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Predicting Syntax: Processing Dative Constructions in American and Australian Varieties of English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Joan Bresnan  and
Marilyn Ford
Joan Bresnan*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Marilyn Ford*
Affiliation:
Griffith University
*
Bresnan Department of Linguistics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 [bresnan@stanford.edu]
Ford School of Information and Communication Technology Griffith University Logan Campus, Meadowbrook QLD 4131, Australia [m.ford@griffith.edu.au]
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Abstract

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers' of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans responded reliably to corpus model probabilities in rating the naturalness of alternative dative constructions, their lexical-decision latencies during reading varied inversely with the syntactic probabilities of the construction, and they showed subtle covariation in these tasks, which is in line with quantitative differences in the choices of datives produced in the same contexts.

Keywords

variationcorpussyntaxpsycholinguisticsprobabilitymixed-effect modeldative alternation

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 86 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 168 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 Linguistic Society of America

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