Lexical Frequency and Syntactic Variation: A Test of a Linguistic Hypothesis

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Contributor
Abstract

The role of lexical frequency in language variation and change has received considerable attention in recent years. Recently Erker and Guy (2012) extended the analysis of frequency effects to morphosyntactic variation. Based on data from 12 Dominican and Mexican speakers from Otheguy and Zentella’s (2012) New York City Spanish corpus, they examined the role of frequency in variation between null and overt subject personal pronouns (SPP). Their results suggest that frequency either activates or amplifies the effects of other constraints such as co-reference. This paper attempts to replicate Erker and Guy’s study with a data set of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American Spanish. Analysis of more than 8,600 tokens shows that frequency has only a small effect on SPP use. In separate analyses of frequent and non-frequent verb forms, fewer constraints reach significance with frequent verb forms only than with non-frequent forms only. Moreover, in cases where constraints reach significance in both analyses, effects are stronger with non-frequent than with frequent forms. Finally, when all verb forms are combined in a single analysis, non-frequent forms are significantly more likely than frequent forms to co-occur with overt SPPs. We conclude that claims about frequency effects in SPP variation should be treated with caution and that further analyses are needed to establish whether models incorporating frequency can be extended to this area of the grammar.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
2013-10-17
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation
Collection