The register-specificity of probabilistic grammatical knowledge in English and Dutch

Probabilistic grammars regulate the way in which we choose between alternative ways of saying the same thing. For example, in English people can say either "Tom sent Mary a letter", or "Tom sent a letter to Mary". Both syntactic variants have roughly the same meaning, and we know that variant choice is a function of precisely quantifiable effects of probabilistic factors such as the length of the recipient ("Mary"), or whether the recipient had been mentioned in previous discourse. The question we are asking is if language users have different probabilistic grammars for different types of speech situations (“registers”) – do our linguistic choice making processes differ depending on whether we engage in e.g. informal conversation or write blog entries? This issue is underresearched but loaded theoretically: sociolinguistic theory predicts that there is one uniform grammar, but preliminary evidence suggests that there may actually be a good deal of registerspecificity. The project settles this matter empirically by investigating the register sensitivity of grammatical variation in English and Dutch. The variation analysis will rely on both corpus evidence (i.e. observation) and a rating task experiment. We will distinguish between four broad registers: informal spoken language (e.g. conversation), formal spoken language (e.g. speeches), informal written language (e.g. blog entries), and formal written language (e.g. quality newspapers).