13th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology
University of Leeds • August 6, 2008
Collocation, Collocation, Collocation: Discourse Formulas in Grammatical Variation Rena Torres Cacoullos University of New Mexico
[email protected]
&
James A. Walker York University
[email protected]
I. INTRODUCTION
-
Table 1: Factors contributing to the occurrence of singular agreement and there’s in plural existentials in Quebec City English.2
role of the lexicon in grammatical variation not well understood o low number of tokens o assumption of strict modularity between grammar and lexicon ‘lexicon’: conventionalized/routinized language units o lexical items o collocations of lexical and functional elements at the phrasal level types of evidence for lexical/collocational effects: o proportion of data (e.g., Poplack 1992) o differences in overall rate (e.g., Thompson & Mulac 1991) o differences in conditioning by language-internal factors
-
-
Total N: Input:
Tense Past Present
(2) (3) (4)
(5)
b. Singular agreement: But there was a lot of foxes. Present contracted: There’s two high schools. Presence of plural –s: But there was a hundred and some lakes up there. Phrasal extension beyond the NP: a. And there were guys that were there also. b. And there were just a few of us sent back, you see. c. There’s not that many places to hide. Presence of intervening material: Oh, I mean, yeah, there was always names.
there’s
946 .526
1,688 .438
.60 .18
[ ] [ ]
Range:
Plural -s Absent Present
42
.63 .37 Range:
II . PLURAL EXISTENTIALS
(1) a. Plural agreement: There were foxes around there.
SG AGR
Extension Adverbial None Clausal
(9:362) 1
26
.64 .53 .43 Range:
(9:361)
Intervening Material Present Absent
(72:006)
21
Range:
(26:943) (2:137) (54:26) (77:125)
[ ] [ ] [ ]
.64 .48
Type of Determiner “a” Quantifier Adjective Bare Negative Definite Number Other Quantifier
(43:427)
[ ] [ ]
16
[ [ [ [ [ [ [ Range:
.58 .49
] ] ] ] ] ] ]
9
.65 .55 .49 .48 .46 .39 .39 25
[ ] = not selected as significant 1
Examples are identified by speaker number and line number in the Quebec City component of the Quebec English corpus (Poplack, Walker & Malcolmson 2006).
2
Factor weights >.5 favour, factor weights
