TY - JOUR
T1 - On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas
T2 - A variationist study of that
AU - Cacoullos, Rena Torres
AU - Walker, James A.
N1 - Funding Information:
* The data on which this study is based were taken from the Quebec English Corpus (Poplack et al. 2006), housed in the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. Financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Re-search Council of Canada in the form of a standard research grant to Shana Poplack and James Walker and a postdoctoral fellowship to Rena Torres Cacoullos. We thank Professor Poplack for her support and for the infrastructure and resources a¤orded by the Sociolinguistics Laboratory. Earlier versions of this study were presented at the an-nual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association (Dalhousie University, Halifax, June 2003), the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (University of Pennsyl-vania, Philadelphia, October 2003), and invited talks at the University of New Mexico, York University, and the University of Edinburgh. We thank audiences there for their comments, and Joan Bybee, Sandra Thompson, Gerard Van Herk, and several anony-mous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Correspondence address: Rena Torres Cacoullos, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, MSC03-2100, Univer-sity of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001, USA. E-mail: rcacoull@umn.edu.
PY - 2009/1
Y1 - 2009/1
N2 - This article provides evidence that, just as lexical meaning is retained in grammaticization, grammatical conditioning persists in fixed discourse formulas. Despite their high frequency and formulaic status, such formulas are not completely autonomous from the productive constructions from which they emerge. This evidence comes from a variationist analysis of that and zero complementizer in a corpus of spoken Canadian English. Testing syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors proposed to account for the variation, we focus on claims that frequent collocations have developed as discourse formulas. Multivariate analysis shows that, although the variation is largely lexically constrained, that serves to demarcate the boundaries of two clauses with lexical content, while zero tends to occur when the clauses function like a single unit. Moreover, the linguistic conditioning of that in frequent collocations that behave like discourse formulas parallels its conditioning in the general construction. These findings suggest that the principle of semantic retention or persistence should be extended to grammar.
AB - This article provides evidence that, just as lexical meaning is retained in grammaticization, grammatical conditioning persists in fixed discourse formulas. Despite their high frequency and formulaic status, such formulas are not completely autonomous from the productive constructions from which they emerge. This evidence comes from a variationist analysis of that and zero complementizer in a corpus of spoken Canadian English. Testing syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors proposed to account for the variation, we focus on claims that frequent collocations have developed as discourse formulas. Multivariate analysis shows that, although the variation is largely lexically constrained, that serves to demarcate the boundaries of two clauses with lexical content, while zero tends to occur when the clauses function like a single unit. Moreover, the linguistic conditioning of that in frequent collocations that behave like discourse formulas parallels its conditioning in the general construction. These findings suggest that the principle of semantic retention or persistence should be extended to grammar.
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U2 - 10.1515/LING.2009.001
DO - 10.1515/LING.2009.001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:58349113891
SN - 0024-3949
VL - 47
SP - 1
EP - 43
JO - Linguistics
JF - Linguistics
IS - 1
ER -