Hostname: page-component-77c78cf97d-9lb97 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-04-24T01:19:26.942Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grammatical relation probability: How usage patterns shape analogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2012

Esther L. Brown  and
Javier Rivas
Esther L. Brown
Affiliation:
University of Colorado at Boulder
Javier Rivas
Affiliation:
University of Colorado at Boulder
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It has been argued speakers' knowledge of the probabilities of certain phones, words, and syntactic structures affects language production (Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Tily, Gahl, Arnon, Snider, Kothari, & Bresnan, 2009). This study provides evidence for effects of grammatical relation probabilities by identifying significant effects on verb morphology in the Spanish presentative [haber ‘there (be)’+ NP] construction stemming from nouns with varying proportion of use in subject function. In addition to this novel type of probability (grammatical relation), we present calculations that are not context-dependent but cumulative, reflecting speakers' overall experience with these nouns in the grammar. We conduct variationist analyses on corpora of spoken Puerto Rican Spanish. Our results reveal that nouns with a high probability of subject function promote the analogical leveling of haber by increasing the likelihood of reanalysis of the object as subject of the construction. We interpret these results as suggesting speakers possess lexicalized knowledge of grammatical relation usage patterns.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , October 2012 , pp. 317 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Alarcos Llorach, Emilio. (1994). Gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar
Ashby, William J., & Bentivoglio, Paola. (1997). Strategies for introducing new referents into discourse: A comparative analysis of French and Spanish presentational structures. In Hammond, R. M. & MacDonald, M. (eds.), Linguistic studies in honor of Bodhan Saciuk. West Lafayette, IN: Learning Systems Inc. 9–26.Google Scholar
Beckner, Clay, Blythe, Richard, Bybee, Joan, Christiansen, Morten H., Croft, William, Ellis, Nick C., Holland, John, Ke, Jinyun, Larsen-Freeman, Diane, & Schoenemann, Tom. (2009). Language is a complex adaptive system: position paper. Language Learning 59(Suppl. 1):1–26.Google Scholar
Bell, Alan, Brenier, Jason M., Gregory, Michelle, Girand, Cynthia, & Jurafsky, Dan. (2009). Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language 60(1):92–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentivoglio, Paola, & Sedano, Mercedes. (1989). Haber: ¿un verbo impersonal? Un estudio sobre el español de Caracas. Estudios sobre español de América y lingüística afroamericana. Ponencias presentadas en el 45 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas (Bogotá, julio de 1985). Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo. 59–81.Google Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18(3):355–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, & Ford, Marilyn. (2009). Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English. Language 86(1):168–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J., & Traugott, Elizabeth C. (2005). Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Esther L., & Raymond, William. (2012). How discourse context shapes the lexicon: Explaining the distribution of Spanish f-/h- words. Diachronica 29(2):139–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Esther L., & Rivas, Javier. (2011). Subject ~ verb word-order in Spanish interrogatives: A quantitative analysis of Puerto Rican Spanish. Spanish in Context 8(1):23–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bush, Nathan. (2001). Frequency effects and word-boundary palatalization in English. In Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 255–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. (1985). Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. (2002). Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation and Change 14:261–290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. (2003). Mechanisms of change in grammaticization: The role of frequency. In Joseph, B. & Janda, R. (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 602–623.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, & Thompson, Sandra A. (1997). Three frequency effects in syntax. Berkeley Linguistics Society 23:65–85.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. (2009). The role of prefabs in grammaticization: How the particular and the general interact in language change. In R. Corrigan, E.A. Moravcsik, H. Ouali, & Wheatley, K. M (eds.), Formulaic language. Vol. 1. Distribution and historical change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 187–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Lyle. (1998). Historical linguistics. An introduction. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Castillo-Trelles, Carolina. (2007). La pluralización del verbo haber impersonal en el español yucateco. In Holmquist, J., Lorenzino, A., & Sayahi, L. (eds.), Selected proceedings of the third workshop on Spanish sociolinguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 74–84.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. (1987). Cognitive constraints on information flow. In S Tomlin, R. (ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 21–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, Franklin, Dell, Gary S., & Bock, J. Kathryn. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review 113(2):234–272.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, Noam. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Coco, Moreno, & Keller, Frank. (2009). The impact of visual information on reference assignment in sentence production. In Taatgen, N. & van Rijn, H. (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Amsterdam: CogSci 2009. 274–279.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology: Syntax and morphology. 2nd ed.Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cortés-Torres, Mayra E. (2005). La perífrasis estar + -ndo en el español puertorriqueño: variación dialectal o contacto lingüístico? Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico.Google Scholar
Croft, William. (2001). Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, Mark. (2002–). Corpus del Español (100 million words, 1200s–1900s). Available at: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org.Google Scholar
D'Aquino Ruiz, Giovanna. (2004). Haber impersonal en el habla de Caracas. Análisis sociolingüístico. Boletín de Lingüística 21:3–26.Google Scholar
D'Aquino Ruiz, Giovanna.. (2008). El cambio lingüístico de haber impersonal. Núcleo 25:103–123.Google Scholar
DeMello, George. (1991). Pluralización del verbo “haber” impersonal en el español hablado culto de once ciudades. Thesaurus 46(3):445–471.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, Manuel. (1999–2000). La pluralización del verbo haber en dos áreas dialectales de Hispanoamérica. Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 15–16:235–245.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, Manuel.. (2003). The pluralization of haber in Venezuelan Spanish: A sociolinguistic change in real time. IU Working Papers in Linguistics 03–05. https://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp/pdfs/03-Diaz-Campos05.pdf Access date: 09/14/2012.Google Scholar
Dixon, Robert M. W. (2010). Basic linguistic theory. Vol. 2. Grammatical topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Domínguez, Carmen, Guzmán, Blanca, Moros, Luis, Pabón, Maryelis, & Vilaín, Roger. (1998). Personalización de haber en el español de Mérida. Lengua y Habla 3(1):23–36.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. (1980). Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In Chafe, W. (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. 203–274.Google Scholar
Erman, Britt, & Warren, Beatrice. (2000). The idiom principle and the open choice principle. Text 20:29–62.Google Scholar
Fontanella de, Weinberg, María, B. (1992). Variación sincrónica y diacrónica de las construcciones con haber en el español americano. Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile 33:35–46.Google Scholar
Freites Barros, Francisco. (2004). Pluralización de haber impersonal en el Táchira: Actitudes lingüísticas. Boletín de Lingüística 22:32–51.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stephan A., Large, Nathan R., & Pisoni, David B. (2000). Perception of wordlikeness: Effects of segment probability and length on the processing of nonwords. Journal of Memory and Language 42(4):481–496.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gahl, Susanne, & Garnsey, Susan M. (2004). Knowledge of grammar, knowledge of usage: Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation. Language 80:748–875.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
García, Erica. (1986). Cambios cuantitativos en la distribución de formas: ¿Causa y síntoma de cambio semántico? In Kossoff, A. D., Kossoff, R. H., Ribbans, G., & Amor y Vázquez, J. (coords.), Actas del VIII congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas: 22–27 agosto 1983. Madrid: Istmo. 557–566.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (2000). Syntax: An introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grammon, Devin. (2012). Nuevas aproximaciones al fenómeno de la pluralización de haber impersonal: Un análisis basado en el uso. Paper presented at the 2nd CU Graduate Conference Framing Narratives, Boulder, University of Colorado, April 13–14, 2012.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. (2005). Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34:365–399.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guy, Gregory. (1993). The quantitative analysis of linguistic variation. In Preston, D. R. (ed.), American dialect research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 223–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Alice, & Campbell, Lyle. (1995). Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hernández Díaz, Axel. (2006). Posesión y existencia: La competencia de haber, tener en la posesión y haber existencial. In Company, C. Company (ed.), Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Primera parte: la frase verbal. Vol. 2. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 1053–1160.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul, & Thompson, Sandra A. (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56(2):251–299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul & Traugott, Elizabeth C. (2003). Grammaticalization. 2nd ed.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. Florian. (2010). Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density. Cognitive Psychology 61(1):23–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jurafsky, Daniel, Bell, Alan, Gregory, Michelle, & Raymond, William D.. (2001). Probablilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 229–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, Edward. (1976). Towards a universal definition of ‘subject’. In Li, C. (ed.), Subject and topic. New York: Academic Press. 303–333.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical prerequisites. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald.. (1990). Settings, participants, and grammatical relations. In Tsohatzidis, S. (ed.), Meanings and prototypes: Studies on linguistic categorization. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 213–238.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian. (2002). Thoughts on grammaticalization. Erfurt, Germany: Universität Erfurt.Google Scholar
López Meirama, Belén. (1997). Aportaciones de la tipología lingüística a una gramática particular: el concepto de orden básico y su aplicación al castellano. Verba 24: 45–82.Google Scholar
Montes de Oca-Sicilia, M. del Pilar. (1994). La concordancia con haber impersonal. Anuario de Letras 32:7–35.Google Scholar
Montes Giraldo, J. Joaquín. (1982). Sobre el sintagma “Haber + sustantivo.” Thesaurus 37(2):383–385.Google Scholar
Moure, Teresa. (1995). Sobre el controvertido perfil del complemento directo. Moenia 1:47–110.Google Scholar
Paolillo, John. (2002). Analyzing linguistic variation: Statistical models and methods. Stanford: CSLA Publications.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (2001). Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast. In Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 137–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Meechan, Marjory. (1998). Introduction: How languages fit together in codemixing. International Journal of Bilingualism 2:127–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Tagliamonte, Sali. (2001). African American English in the diaspora. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Quintanilla-Aguilar, José R. A. (2009). La (des)pluralización del verbo haber existencial en el español salvadoreño: ¿Un cambio en progreso? Ph.D., University of Florida.Google Scholar
Rand, David, & Sankoff, David. (2001). GoldVarb: A variable rule application for Macintosh. Toronto: University of Toronto, Department of Statistics.Google Scholar
Raymond, William D., Dautricourt, Robin, & Hume, Elizabeth. (2006). Word-medial /t,d/ deletion in spontaneous speech: Modeling the effects of extra-linguistic, lexical, and phonological factors. Language Variation and Change 18:55–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raymond, William D., & Brown, Esther L. (2012). Are effects of word frequency effects in of context of use? An analysis of initial fricative reduction in Spanish. In Gries, S. Th. & Divjak, D. S. (eds.), Frequency effects in language. Vol 2: Learning and processing. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. 35–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rivas, Javier. (2004). Clause structure typology: Grammatical relations in cross-linguistic perspective. Lugo: Tris Tram.Google Scholar
Rodríguez Mondoñedo, Miguel. (2006). Spanish existentials and other accusative constructions. In Boeckx, C. (ed.), Minimalist essays. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 326–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, David. (1988). Variable rules. In AmmonDittmar, U. N., & Mattheier, K. J. (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society. New York: Walter de Gruyter. 984–997.Google Scholar
Szmrecsányi, Benedikt. (2005). Language users as creatures of habit: A corpus-based analysis of persistence in spoken English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1):113–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A., & Hopper, Paul. (2001). Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation. In Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 27–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tily, Harry, Gahl, Susanne, Arnon, Inbal, Snider, Neal, Kothari, Anubha, & Bresnan, Joan. (2009). Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech. Language and Cognition 1(2):147–165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, & Travis, Catherine E. (2010). Variable yo expression in New Mexico: English influence? In Rivera-Mills, S. & Villa, D. J. (eds.), Spanish in the U.S. Southwest: A language in transition. Madrid: Iberoamericana. 185–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, & Walker, James A. (2009). The present of the English future: Grammatical variation and collocations in discourse. Language 85(2):321–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaquero, María T. (1978). Enseñar español, pero ¿qué español? Boletín de la Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española 6:127–146.Google Scholar
Vázquez Rozas, Victoria, & García-Miguel, José M. (2006). Transitividad, subjetividad y frecuencia de uso en español. VII congrés de lingüística general. Actes, del 18 al 21 d'abril de 2006. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. CD-Rom.Google Scholar
Vergara Wilson, Damián. (2009). From “remaining” to “becoming” in Spanish: The role of prefabs in the development of the construction quedar(se) + adjective. In Corrigan, R., Moravcsik, E. A. H. Ouali, & Wheatley, K. M. (eds.), Formulaic language. Vol. 1. Distribution and historical change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 273–295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waltereit, Richard, & Detges, Ulrich. (2008). Syntactic change from within and from without syntax: A usage-based analysis. In Waltereit, R. & Detges, U. (eds.), The paradox of grammatical change: Perspectives from Romance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 13–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar