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This study shows how we can use the study of diachronic syntax to provide a unified account of diachronically stable sociolinguistic variation, syntactic optionality, and syntactic change in terms of an independently motivated phenemeon: competing grammars (Kroch 1989). Without any complication to our model of the linguistic system beyond competing grammars, I will show: first, that stable variation, grammatical optionality, and syntactic change in progress are plausibly a single phenomenon in terms of a speaker’s internal system. Secondly, the apparent differences between these phenomena are the result of how variation interacts with pressures of language acquisition and the mathematical properties of linguistically relevant domains external to the variation (e.g. style).
In the talk I will discuss a number of case studies which have been described either as diachronically stable variation or as optional operations, including: -in/-ing variation, English topicalization, whether/if variation in embedded questions (Bailey et al. 2012), and relative clause extraposition. I show that all of these are best understood as instances of the "competing grammars" phenomenon, i.e. the same alternation between linguistic variants which occurs during a syntactic change in progress. However, the competition between variants plays out differently in each case due to different domains along which the variants are trying to specialize for different uses, according to an acquisition pressure, the “Principle of Contrast” (Clark 1987, 1990). "Stable" variation is just a special case of competing grammars where variants specialize along a continuous dimension. Furthermore, a diachronic study of relative clause extraposition in parsed corpora of English, Icelandic, French, and Portuguese suggests that truly stable variation may not really exist at all.
Bailey, Laura, Joel C. Wallenberg, and Wim van der Wurff. 2012. Embedded yes/no questions:
reanalysis and replacement. Paper presented at Presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the
Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB), University of Salford.
Clark, Eve. 1987. The Principle of Contrast: A constraint on language acquisition. In Mechanisms of language acquisition, ed. Brian MacWhinney, The 20th Annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Clark, Eve. 1990. On the pragmatics of contrast. Journal of Child Language 17:417–431.
Kroch, Anthony S. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation
and Change 1:199–244.
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