This chapter begins with a general discussion of potential data types in variationist linguistics. Next, we present the two main data sources we use in the study: the International Corpus of English (ICE) and the Global Corpus of Web-Based English (GloWbE). The former comprises a set of parallel, balanced corpora representative of language usage across a wide range of standard national varieties. Each ICE corpus contains 500 texts of 2000 words each, sampled from twelve spoken and written genres/registers, totaling approx. 1 million words. GloWbE contains data collected from 1.8 million English language websites – both blogs and general web pages – from twenty different countries (approx. 1.8 billion words in all). Discussion of the corpora is followed by a detailed description of the data collection, identification, and annotation procedures for our three alternations. Here we carefully define the variable context for each alternation, and outline the methods for coding various linguistic constraints that are included in our analyses.

This chapter interrogates corpus data to analyze the three alternations subject to study in this book one by one using a battery of state-of-the-art analysis techniques in addition to customary descriptive statistics, Conditional Random Forest (CRF) modeling and mixed-effects logistic regression analysis. The goal of the chapter is to uncover qualitative generalizations: for example, we see that while effect directions of constraints on variation are generally stable across varieties of English, effects strengths can be significantly different.

This chapter is inspired by work in comparative sociolinguistics and quantitative dialectometry. We use a corpus-based method (Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling – VADIS for short) to quantify the similarity between, and coherence across, the varieties of English under study as a function of the correspondence of the ways in which language users choose between different ways of saying the same thing. Key findings include the result that probabilistic grammars are remarkably stable across varieties but that coherence across alternations is not perfect.

This chapter surveys the literature on variation in general and on grammatical variables (a.k.a. "alternations'') in particular. Next, we review well-known grammatical variables/alternations in English as well as previous comparative investigations of grammatical alternations in English. Last but not least, we discuss in detail previous variationist work on the three alternations subject to study in this book: the genitive alternation, the dative alternation, and the particle placement alternation.

Second Language Acquisition is a complex process, and Learner Corpus Research is increasingly turning to complex statistical methods. While traditional approaches mostly relied on simple frequency counts and monofactorial analyses, some recent studies employ more sophisticated statistics that permit the inclusion of more than one predictor variable as well as more varied kinds of probabilistic/distributional information such as association strengths and dispersion values. One such recent approach is called MuPDAR (Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis Using Regression; Gries & Adelman 2014, Gries & Deshors 2014). One intriguing aspect of MuPDAR is its extensibility: in its current form, the exploration of the learner data can be L1-specific, but in the present paper we extend this approach towards also including speaker-specific effects. As such, this method should appeal to the growing number of researchers who are interested in investigating individual variation. We present a case study of genitive alternation in the Chinese and German sections of the International Corpus of Learner English alongside English native speaker data obtained from the International Corpus of English, and we illustrate different ways in which the MuPDAR approach could be extended to obtain models that license deeper interpretation at the individual speaker level.

This chapter investigates the intersection between gender, writing and editing of published written texts and endonormativity in South African English. We focus on three sub-varieties within the South African context: two indigenous strands, Afrikaans English (AfrE) and Black South African English (BSAfE), and the settler strand, White South African English (WSAfE). We use multifactorial methods to analyse the effects of gender amongst a set of linguistic and extra-linguistic variables conditioning the genitive alternation across unedited and edited texts produced by AfrE, BSAfE and WSAfE authors. The results show that gender plays a minor role in conditioning the genitive alternation for both authors and editors, demonstrating that the genitive choices of men and women are conditioned in similar ways. As expected, linguistic factors play the greatest role in conditioning the genitive alternation. Our findings confirm recent investigations into cross-varietal and register differences and show that while the direction of the effect of linguistic factors is the same across sub-varieties and registers, the strength of these factors differs in certain sub-varieties and registers. Our findings also confirm recent findings regarding the genitive alternation in second-language varieties and suggest a possible substrate transfer effect, in especially BSAfE writing. Although editorial intervention introduces subtle shifts in preferences for the two constructions, this intervention mostly reinforces the choices of authors.

This paper studies the genitive alternation in British English and Sri Lankan English on the basis of more than 4,000 annotated cases of of- and s-genitives from the British and Sri Lankan components of the International Corpus of English. Specifically, we explore the effects of a variety of language-internal and language-external effects, focusing in particular on how these factors affect genitive choices both on their own, but also in interaction with each other and, a first in this kind of variety research, with the gender of the speakers. Our results corroborate previous findings regarding the language-internal factors, but we also obtain a variety of statistical effects representing interactions of those with variety and gender: for instance, animacy effects are stronger in Sri Lankan English, but animacy and length/weight effects are moderated by speaker gender; we discuss these and other findings with regard to processing, language contact and gender (in-)equality. Methodologically, we are developing two innovations for variationist research, namely a principled way to identify and then also visualise the effect of interactions in random forests.

There is an ongoing debate about the analysis of argument structure in a usage-based construction grammar. Some scholars have argued that argument structure is licensed by fully abstract schemas, but other researchers have claimed that argument structure is primarily determined by particular verbs. Chapter 7 argues that this controversy is easily resolved if we analyze argument structure in the framework of a network model in which verbs and constructions are interconnected by probabilistic links. For instance, the two constructions of the dative alternation occur with an overlapping set of verbs that are statistically biased to be used in one or the other constructions. The statistical biases can be analyzed as filler-slot associations that are shaped by two factors: (1) general conceptual processes of event semantics and (2) speakers’ experience with particular verbs and constructions. The analysis is supported by evidence from research on sentence processing and the extension of argument schemas to novel verbs in L1 acquisition and language change.

Constituent structure is commonly represented in phrase structure trees, which one might analyze as some kind of network. However, while phrase structure graphs are useful to explain certain aspects of syntactic structure, they are not fully compatible with the dynamic network approach, as these graphs are built from primitive concepts. Challenging the traditional approach, Chapter 9 outlines a dynamic network analysis of constituency in which the hierarchical organization of linguistic structure is emergent from the interaction of several domain-general processes, including conceptualization, automatization, analogy and abstraction, which together account for both the syntactic generalizations that have been in the focus of formal syntax and the many idiosyncracies that reflect the influence of speakers’ experience with particular constructions. The proposed analysis casts a fresh light on syntactic constituency and has far-reaching implications for the theory of phrase structure and the analysis of word order correlations.