Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T13:00:11.897Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Combinatorial Variability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2006

DAVID ADGER
DAVID ADGER
Affiliation:
Queen Mary, University of London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a plausibility argument for a new way of thinking about intra-personal morphosyntactic variation. The idea is embedded within the framework of the Minimalist Program, and makes use of notions of feature interpretability and feature checking. Specifically, I argue that underspecification of uninterpretable features in a matching relation with interpretable features allows us to model categoricality and variability within a single system. Unlike many current approaches to intra-personal variation (which involve multiple grammars or building stochastic weightings into the grammar itself), the system attempts to predict (rather than capture) frequencies of variants. It does this by combining an evaluation metric for the acquisition of uninterpretable features with the standard properties of features and syntactic operations in the Minimalist framework. The argument is made through a case study of was/were variation in a Scottish dialect.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , November 2006 , pp. 503 - 530
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This work is a development of ideas from an earlier paper by Jennifer Smith and myself, so I hereby include the acknowledgments from the paper (Adger & Smith 2005). In addition, I'd like to thank participants in may classes at Tromsø (October 2004) and at the LOT Winter School in Groningen (January 2005), and members of the Linguistic Research Group at Queen Mary for comments which have really helped my thinking about these issues. More specific thanks are due to an anonymous JL referee, Jenny Cheshire, Daniel Habour, Tony Kroch, Janne Johannessen, Fritz Newmeyer, Jeff Parrott, Andrew Radford, Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke and Rob Truswell, and of course to Jennifer Smith, without whose fantastic empirical work and sociolinguistically informed comments none of this would have been possible.