Exploring probabilistic grammar(s) in varieties of English around the world.

The project is situated at the crossroads of research on English as a World Language, usage-based theoretical linguistics, variationist linguistics, and cognitive sociolinguistics. It specifically marries the spirit of the PROBABILISTIC GRAMMAR FRAMEWORK (which posits that grammatical knowledge is experience-based and partially probabilistic) to research along the lines of the ENGLISH WORLD-WIDE PARADIGM (which is concerned with the dialectology and sociolinguistics of post-colonial English-speaking communities around the world). The overarching objective is to understand the lectal plasticity of probabilistic knowledge of English grammar, on the part of language users with diverse regional and cultural backgrounds. Empirically, the project taps into a large corpus database sampling naturalistic language usage in some ten different varieties of English, and conducts a supplementary rating-task experiment. Utilizing modern analysis, modeling, and interpretation techniques, the project aims to probe the probabilistic factors constraining three syntactic alternations in the grammar of English: the genitive alternation (the president's speech versus the speech of the president), the dative alternation (we sent him a letter versus we sent a letter to him), and particle placement (he looked the word up versus he looked up the word). Research questions to be addressed include the following: What is the extent to which varieties of English share a core probabilistic grammar that is explanatory across different varieties? Which of the individual probabilistic constraints are universal, and which are culturally malleable? Are lectal differences random, or can they be explained by considering variety type (e.g. mother-tongue versus indigenized second-language varieties)? The proposed project is innovative in that it synthesizes two hitherto rather disjoint lines of research into one unifying project, thus injecting methodological and theoretical rigor into research in the English World-Wide paradigm, and providing the Probabilistic Grammar framework with a challenging, new empirical testing ground.

Keywords:English, probabilistic grammar(s)

Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies