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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 27:3 (2022) ► pp.259–290

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Lectal contamination

Evidence from corpora and from agent-based simulation

ORCiD logo with link | RU Lilith, University of Liège
Published online: 13 June 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20040.pij
Abstract
This paper presents evidence from both corpora and agent-based simulation for the effect of lectal contamination. By doing so, it shows how agent-based simulation can be used as a complementary technique to corpus research in the study of language variation. Lectal contamination is an effect whereby the words that are typical of a language variety more often appear in a morphosyntactic variant typical of that same variety, even among language use from a different variety. This study looks at the Dutch partitive genitive construction, which exhibits variation between a “Netherlandic” variant with -s ending and a “Belgian” variant without -s ending. It is shown that the probability of the Belgian variant without -s increases among more “Belgian” words, in the language use of both Belgians and people from the Netherlands. Meanwhile, an agent-based simulation reveals the crucial theoretical preconditions that lead to this effect.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preconditions and predictions of lectal contamination
  • 3.Corpus study
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Analyses
  • 4.Agent-based simulation
    • 4.1Design and evaluation
    • 4.2Implementation
    • 4.3Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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