Cover not available

Article published In: Current trends in analyzing syntactic variation:
Edited by Ludovic De Cuypere, Clara Vanderschueren and Gert de Sutter
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 31] 2017
► pp. 8–29

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Syntactic alternation research

Taking stock and some suggestions for the future

 | University of California, Santa Barbara |
Published online: 23 April 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00001.gri
Abstract
Over the last 20 or so years, research on syntactic alternations has made great strides in both theoretical and methodological ways. On the theoretical side, much of the research on syntactic alternations was restricted to generative linguistics debating how near synonymous constructions differed slightly in meaning and/or how one (and which one) was derived from the other (transformationally). On the methodological side, much research consisted of monofactorial studies based on relatively simple text counts. By now, however, syntactic alternation research has become much more functional (in a broad sense of the term) and much more methodologically sophisticated: Much work is now motivated/interpreted psycholinguistically or in a broadly usage-based/cognitive linguistic framework and much work has now adopted a regression-based analytical strategy. These attractive developments notwithstanding, much remains to be done and, in this paper, I sketch some recent developments in (largely) separate alternation studies that I would like the field to adopt more broadly. These developments can be heuristically grouped into ones that have to do with (i) the statistical analysis of corpus-based and experimental alternation data, (ii) new predictors that explain typically unexplored aspects of variability in alternations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1General introduction
  • 2.Improvements 1: Better methods
    • 2.1More on autocorrelation
      • 2.1.1Beta persistence
      • 2.1.2Cumulative priming
      • 2.1.3Surprisal
      • 2.1.4Similarity
      • 2.1.5Interim summary
    • 2.2More on regression modeling
      • 2.2.1On model selection and model amalgamation
      • 2.2.2On effects and comparisons
      • 2.2.3On predicting and imputing
    • 2.3Alternatives to regression modeling
  • 3.Improvements 2: Underused predictors
    • 3.1Information-theoretic predictors
    • 3.2Phonological predictors
      • 3.2.1Rhythmic alternation
      • 3.2.2Segment alternation
    • 3.3Interim summary
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • References
References (46)
References
Attneave, Fred. 1959. Applications of Information Theory to Psychology: A Summary of Basic Concepts, Methods and Results. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2011. “Corpus Linguistics and Naïve Discriminative Learning.” Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics 11(2): 295–218.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Jacolien von Rij, Cecile de, Cat C., and Simon N. Wood. to appear a. Autocorrelated Errors in Experimental Data in the Language Sciences: Some Solutions Offered by Generalized Additive Mixed Models. In Mixed effects regression models in Linguistics, ed by Dirk Speelman, Kris Heylen, and D. Geeraerts. Berlin and Springer.
Baayen, R. Harald, Shravan Vasishth, Douglas M. Bates, and Reinhold Kliegl. to appear b. “The Cave of Shadows. Addressing the Human Factor with Generalized Additive Mixed Models.” Journal of Memory and Language.
Barr, Dale J., Roger Levy, Christoph Scheepers, and Harry J. Tily. 2013. “Random Effects Structure for Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing: Keep it Maximal.” Journal of Memory and Language 68(3): 255–278. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas M. Reinhold Kliegl, Shravan Vasishth, and R. Harald Baayen. submitted. “Parsimonious Mixed Models.”
Bernolet, Sarah, Timothy Colleman, and Robert Hartsuiker. 2014. “The ‘Sense Boost’ to Dative Priming: Evidence for Sense-Specific Verb-Structure Links.” Journal of Memory and Language 76(1): 113–126. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bretz, Frank, Torsten Hothorn, and Peter Westfall. 2010. Multiple Comparisons Using R. Boca Raton, FL, London, and New York: Chapman and Hall / CRC. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burnham, Kenneth P. and David R. Anderson. 2002. Model Selection and Multimodel Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach. 2nd ed. London and New York: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 1986. An Introduction to English Prosody. Tübingen: Edward Arnold and Niemeyer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deshors, Sandra C. and Stefan Th. Gries. 2016. “Profiling Verb Complementation Constructions across New Englishes: A Two-Step Random Forests Analysis to ing vs. to Complements.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21(2): 192–218. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Francom, Jerid. 2009. Experimental syntax: Exploring the Effect of Repeated Exposure to Anomalous Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Rating and Reading tasks. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gerard, Jeffrey, Frank Keller, and Themis Palpanas. 2010. “Corpus Evidence for Age Effects on Priming in Child Language.” In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. by Stellan Ohlsson and Richard Catrambone, 1559–1564.’Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th.. 2003. Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A Study of Particle Placement. London and New York: Continuum Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. “New Perspectives on Old Alternations.” In Papers from the 39th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Vol. II. The Panels, ed. by Jonathan E. Cihlar, Amy L. Franklin, and David W. Kaiser, 274–292. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistics Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “Commentary.” In Kathryn Allan and Justyna Robinson (eds.), Current Methods in Historical Semantics, 184–195. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “The Most Underused Statistical Method in Corpus Linguistics: Multi-Level (and Mixed-Effects) models.” Corpora 10(1): 95–125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “Frequencies of (Co-)Occurrence vs. Variationist Corpus Approaches towards Alternations: Variability due to Random Effects and Autocorrelation.” In Triangulating Methodological Approaches in Corpus Linguistic Research, ed. by Paul Baker and Jesse Egbert, 108–123. New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th.. and Allison S. Adelman. 2014. “Subject Realization in Japanese Conversation by Native and Non-Native speakers: Exemplifying a New Paradigm for Learner Corpus Research.” In Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014: New Empirical and Theoretical Paradigms, ed. by Jesús Romero-Trillo, 35–54. Cham: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th.. and Tobias J. Bernaisch. 2016. “Exploring Epicenters Empirically: Focus on South Asian Englishes.” English World-Wide 37(1): 1–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th.. and Sandra C. Deshors. 2014. “Using Regressions to Explore Deviations between Corpus Data and a Standard/Target: Two Suggestions.” Corpora 9(1): 109–136. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th.. and Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. “Extending Collostructional Analysis: A Corpus-Based Perspective on ‘Alternations’.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 97–129. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th.. and Stefanie Wulff. 2009. “Psycholinguistic and Corpus Linguistic Evidence for L2 Constructions.” Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 71: 163–186. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hale, John. 2001. “A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model.” Proceedings of the second meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language technologies. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harrell, Frank E. Jr. 2015. Regression Modeling Strategies. […]. 2nd ed. London and New York: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. Florian. 2011. “Corpus-Based Research on Language Production: Information Density and Reducible Subject Relatives.” In Language from a Cognitive Perspective: Grammar, Usage, and Processing, ed. by Emily M. Bender and Jennifer Arnold, 161–197. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. Florian and Neal Snider. 2008. “Implicit Learning and Syntactic Persistence: Surprisal and Cumulativity.” In Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society Conference, ed. by Bradley C. Love, Kenneth McRae, K., Vladimir M. Sloutsky, 1061–1066. Washington, DC.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Judd, Charles M., Jacob Westfall, and David A. Kenny. 2017. “Experiments with More than One Random Factor: Designs, Analytic Models, and Statistical Power.” Annual Review of Psychology 68(1). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuperman, Victor and Joan Bresnan. 2012. “The Effects of Construction Probability on Word Durations during Spontaneous Incremental Sentence Production.” Journal of Memory and Language 66(4): 588–611. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Linzen, Tal and T. Florian Jaeger. 2015. “Uncertainty and Expectation in Sentence Processing: Evidence From Subcategorization Distributions.” Cognitive Science 40(6): 1382–1411. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Matuschek, Hannes, Reinhold Kliegl, Shravan Vasishth, R. Harald Baayen, and Douglas M. Bates. subm. “Balancing Type I Error and Power in Linear Mixed Models.”
Miglio, Viola G., Stefan Th. Gries, Michael J. Harris, Eva M. Wheeler, and Raquel Santana-Paixão. 2013. “Spanish lo(s)-le(s) Clitic Alternations in Psych Berbs: A Multifactorial Corpus-Based Analysis.” In Selected Proceedings of the 15th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. by Jennifer Cabrelli Amaro, Gillian Lord, and Ana de Prada Pérez, and Jessi E. Aaron, 268–278. Somerville, MA. Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pickering, Martin J. and Holly P. Branigan. 1998. “The Representation of Verbs: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Language Production.” Journal of Memory and Language 39(4): 633–651. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scheepers, Christoph. 2003. “Syntactic Priming of Relative Clause Attachments: Persistence of Structural Configuration in Sentence Production.” Cognition 89(3): 179–205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schlüter, Julia. 2003. “Phonological Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English: Chomsky’s Worst Possible Case.” In Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, ed. by Günter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf, 69–118. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “Rhythmic Influence on Grammar: Scope and Limitations.” In Rhythm in Phonetics, Grammar and Cognition, ed. by Ralf Vogel and Ruben Vijver, 179–206. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Snider, Neal. 2009. “Similarity and Structural Priming.” In Proceedings of the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science, ed. by Niels A. Taatgen and Hedderik van Rijn, 815–820.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. “Collostructions: Investigating the Interaction between Words and Constructions.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 209–243. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2005. “Language Users as Creatures of Habit: A Corpus-Linguistic Analysis of Persistence in Spoken English.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1): 113–150. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Morphosyntactic Persistence in Spoken English. A Corpus Study at the Intersection of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Discourse Analysis. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Theijssen, Daphne, Louis ten Bosch, Lou Boves, Bert Cranen and Hans van Halteren. 2013. “Choosing Alternatives: Using Bayesian Networks and Memory-Based Learning to Study the Dative Alternation”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 9(2): 227–262. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vogel, Ralf and Ruben Vijver (eds.). 2015. Rhythm in Phonetics, Grammar and Cognition. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vennemann, Theo. 1988. Preference Laws for Syllable Structure and the Explanation of Sound Change. With Special Reference to German, Germanic, Italian and Latin. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wulff, Stefanie and Stefan Th. Gries. 2015. “Prenominal Adjective Order Preferences in Chinese and German L2 English: A Multifactorial Corpus Study.” Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 5(1): 122–150. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wulff, Stefanie, Stefan Th. Gries, and Nicholas Lester. To appear. “Optional that in Complementation by German and Spanish Learners: Where and How German and Spanish Learners Differ from Native Speakers.” In What Does Applied Cognitive Linguistics Look Like? Answers from the L2 Classroom and SLA Studies, ed. by Andrea Tyler and Carol Moder. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Cited by (17)

Cited by 17 other publications

Gonzalez, Becky
2025. Exploring factors that influence the accusative/dative experiencer alternation in Spanish psych verbs: data from three types of Spanish–English bilinguals. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 18:2 ► pp. 425 ff. DOI logo
Keersmaekers, Alek
2025. 777Representing Semantic Roles in Greek Treebanks. In Advances in Ancient Greek Linguistics, ► pp. 777 ff. DOI logo
Ma, Ruiming, Thomas Van Hoey & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2025. Isomorphism-inspired theorising about optionality and variation: no empirical support from English grammar. English Language and Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Mallart, Cyriel, Andrew Simpkin, Nicolas Ballier, Paula Lissón, Rémi Venant, Bernardo Stearns, Jen-Yu Li & Thomas Gaillat
2025. Assessing the validity of syntactic alternations as criterial features of proficiency in L2 writings in English. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 4:3 ► pp. 100238 ff. DOI logo
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Tanguy Dubois
2025. Optionality, Complexity, Difficulty: The Next Step: A Commentary on “Complexity and Difficulty in Second Language Acquisition: A Theoretical and Methodological Overview”. Language Learning 75:2 ► pp. 599 ff. DOI logo
Tamaredo, Iván
2025. Testing lexical specificity hypotheses in world Englishes: evidence from the null subject alternation. Folia Linguistica DOI logo
Zou, Yue & Hao Lin
2025. Word order flexibility affects complementizer omission: a cross-linguistic investigation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory DOI logo
Míguez, Vítor
2024. Mood Alternation with Adverbs of Uncertainty in Galician: A Multifactorial Analysis. Languages 9:6 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo
Thomas, Guillaume & Germino Duarte
2024. A multivariate analysis of canonical and non-canonical uses of switch-reference markers in Mbyá narratives. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory DOI logo
Wang, Menglan, Guiying Jiang & Yan Cheng
2024. A Corpus-Based Multifactorial Study of Help/help to Alternation in Learners’ Language: From the Perspective of Probabilistic Grammar. Sage Open 14:4 DOI logo
Zhang, Xu & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2024. Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling. Register Studies 6:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Wyroślak, Piotr
2023. Accusative-instrumental alternation in Polish. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 68:1 ► pp. 41 ff. DOI logo
De Troij, Robbert, Stefan Grondelaers, Dirk Speelman & Antal van den Bosch
2022. Lexicon or grammar? Using memory-based learning to investigate the syntactic relationship between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch. Natural Language Engineering 28:5 ► pp. 649 ff. DOI logo
Akinlotan, Mayowa
2021. A corpus-driven description of when-adverbial in Nigerian and British Englishes. Glottotheory 12:2 ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo
Kang, Hui & Jiajin Xu
2021. A Multifactorial Analysis of Concessive Clause Positioning. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 28:4 ► pp. 356 ff. DOI logo
Davidse, Kristin & Hendrik De Smet
2020. Diachronic Corpora. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 211 ff. DOI logo
Vetchinnikova, Svetlana & Turo Hiltunen
2020. ELF and Language Change at the Individual Level. In Language Change, ► pp. 205 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue