Measuring Syntactic Difference in British English

Recent work by Nerbonne and Wiersma (2006) has provided a foundation for measuring syntactic differences between corpora. It uses part-of-speech trigrams as an approximation to syntactic structure, comparing the trigrams of two corpora for statistically significant differences. This paper extends the method and its application. It extends the method by using leafpath ancestors of Sampson (2000) instead of trigrams, which capture internal syntactic structure—every leaf in a parse tree records the path back to the root. The corpus used for testing is the International Corpus of English, Great Britain (Nelson et al., 2002), which contains syntactically annotated speech of Great Britain. The speakers are grouped into geographical regions based on place of birth. This is different in both nature and number than previous experiments, which found differences between two groups of Norwegian L2 learners of English. We show that dialectal variation in eleven British regions from the ICEGB is detectable by our algorithm, using both leaf-ancestor paths and trigrams.