Regional variation in probabilistic grammars: A multifactorial study of the English dative alternation

This study is part of the project "Exploring probabilistic grammar(s) in varieties of English around the World" and explores the underlying constraints that shape syntactic variation in new varieties of English around the World. More precisely, my research is concerned with the probabilistic constraints that influence the choice between a ditransitive (e.g. "John gives Mary the apple") and a prepositional dative (e.g. "John gives the apple to Mary") and the extent to which these constraints are socially or regionally malleable. Situated thus at the cross-roads of research in Cognitive Sociolinguistics, the probabilistic grammar framework and World Englishes, I aim to tease apart the extent to which speakers' grammatical knowledge differs across a wide set of different dialects of the same language. Using mixed-effects modeling, conditional random forests, collexeme analysis and multidimensional scaling techniques, my study shows that probabilistic grammars are not as stable as hitherto assumed and that their presumed stability or variability is dependent on the lexical items and the syntactic alternation included in one’s analysis.