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Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English

Paper · 2017 · Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Jason Grafmiller, Joan Bresnan et al.

Summary

The paper presents a new, freely downloadable resource for comparing syntactic variation in speech across regional Englishes. The authors pooled several earlier, smaller collections of two word-order alternations: the genitive (s-genitive vs. of-genitive) and the dative with give (ditransitive vs. prepositional). The data cover four inner-circle varieties: British, American, Canadian and New Zealand English. They rebuilt the collections to one shared specification, keeping only tokens where both variants could genuinely substitute for each other, and coded the main constraints the same way throughout. They also checked whether key predictors were distributed unevenly across sub-datasets. Regression modelling, an assessment of overall constraint importance, and pairwise contrasts between varieties showed that the probabilistic grammars differ only subtly. The dominant picture is strong cross-variety similarity. The authors note that several reported contrasts do not replicate in earlier or later studies, which suggests that such comparisons depend heavily on data sources and coding choices. The resource matters because it makes careful, comparable cross-dialect modelling of syntactic choice possible.

Key points

  • The genitive data come from four corpora:
    • Switchboard for AmE (N = 1104), with an extra 319 CSAE tokens included in the release but left out of this analysis.
    • FRED oral-history interviews for BrE (N = 1651).
    • Ontario Dialects Archive interviews for CanE (N = 1983).
    • ONZE Canterbury Corpus for NZE (N = 1953).
  • Only determiner s-genitives and of-genitives that start with a definite article count as alternating. The dative dataset is limited to the verb give.
  • Predictor distributions were broadly consistent across sub-datasets, including possessor/possessum length, animacy, and recipient/theme length and pronominality. Raw genitive rates did vary, which the authors attribute mainly to register and topic differences.
  • With six pairwise comparisons, the Bonferroni threshold is p = .05/6 ≈ .008. Final sibilancy in the genitive survives this correction, but most interaction effects do not.
  • The datasets and documentation are available at purl.stanford.edu/qj187zs3852. Social factors are partly annotated but were not modelled.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Admit a token into the dataset only if the competing variant could replace it without changing meaning; otherwise frequency comparisons mix real choices with forced ones.
  • I2. Before comparing groups, check that the important predictors are distributed similarly in every sub-corpus, so that sampling differences are not mistaken for grammatical differences.
  • I3. When running many pairwise tests, correct the significance threshold, and treat uncorrected "contrasts" as exploratory, because they often fail to replicate.
  • I4. Set aside near-categorical contexts, such as animate possessors almost always taking the s-genitive, so that the genuinely variable part of the grammar becomes visible.
  • I5. Model word-order alternations as the outcome of interacting ordering principles such as end weight, given-before-new and animacy, rather than as fixed rules.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (back): When generation chooses between "gave him the book" and "gave the book to him", the realizer could be tested only on contexts where both outputs are valid paraphrases.
  • I2 (tree): When merging treebanks or converting UD dialects, compare distributions of sentence length, pronoun rate and genre first, so parser score gaps are not blamed on the dialect itself.
  • I3 (learn): Evaluations comparing parsers or repair rules across several treebanks could apply Bonferroni-style correction before claiming that one witness is better on a given dialect.
  • I4 (learn): Training-signal analysis could drop trivially predictable cases before measuring where silver data and teacher disagree, focusing repair rules on truly ambiguous decisions.
  • I5 (back): The text → graph → text compressor could rank dative and genitive realizations by constituent length, givenness and animacy recorded in the world model, and explain each choice.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States310 works · 284,480 citations🎓University of TorontoToronto · Canada47 works · 50,254 citations🎓KU LeuvenLeuven · Belgium25 works · 5,716 citations🎓University of BirminghamBirmingham · United Kingdom11 works · 62,331 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksSyntax & grammar formalisms · 162 works

Cite

Cite as Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Jason Grafmiller, Joan Bresnan, Anette Rosenbach, Sali Tagliamonte and Simon Todd. 2017. Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.310

@article{szmrecsanyi2017spoken,
  title = {{Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English}},
  author = {Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Jason Grafmiller, Joan Bresnan, Anette Rosenbach, Sali Tagliamonte and Simon Todd},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.310},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.310}
}

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  48. How to cite this article: Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Jason Grafmiller, Joan Bresnan, Anette Rosenbach, Sali Tagliamonte and Simon Todd. 2017. Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 86. 1–27, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.310 ↗
  49. Submitted: 07 December 2016 find
  50. Published: 29 September 2017 find
  51. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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