Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik

On-Going Change in English Modality: Emancipation Through Frequency The English modal expressions BE going to, HAVE got to, and want to are often contracted to gonna, gotta, and wanna in spoken language. These contracted forms have gained both in frequency and conventionality in recent times.

In this article, I present an investigation into the status of the contractions between phonetic reduction and lexicality. The contracted forms are observed to undergo a process of ›emancipation‹, that is, they move towards increasing conceptual independence from their source forms, with the most frequent one, gonna, leading the way. Emancipation is therefore construed as a frequency effect. The study is based on American English data, both from spontaneous spoken language and a diachronic corpus.

In this paper I propose an emancipation effect that may follow from the ‘reducing effect’ of frequency (Bybee 2006): if a reduced realization of an item gains in frequency, it will become conceptually independent from the full form. In a context of grammaticalization, I show that this is the case for the form gonna, which is becoming emancipated from its source form going to. I use corpus data of spoken American English to trace the process of emancipation as gonna sheds off the features of phonetic reduction and acquires those of a lexical variant.

The present study explores the broad hypothesis that in rapid speech speakers use words that are more easily retrieved and processed. This idea follows from findings about the effects of speech rate and frequency.
The frequency of a word or string in a language has often been evoked as a determining factor in processes of both language production and processing (e.g. Bybee 2006, Diessel 2007). Production is faster for high-frequency words (Jurafsky et al. 2001), sequences (Arnon & Cohen Priva 2013) or syntactic patterns (Gahl & Garnsey 2004); high-frequency sequences are also processed more quickly (Arnon & Snider 2010). This is explained by the assumption that frequent items or structures are generally more predictable and that speakers and listeners “process the most likely events with the greatest ease” (Dell & Gordon 2003: 9). Rapid speech as such, however, is a potential source of processing difficulties in communication; speakers need to access lexical items faster when speaking above their usual rate. It is possible, then, that speakers mitigate these difficulties by reverting to more frequent words, which are more easily retrieved and processed.

This hypothesis is tested on conversation data from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (DuBois et al. 2000-2005), which provides audio recordings and time-aligned transcripts. Predicative adjectives were chosen as a testing ground because they are easy to identify, show a great deal of variation (e.g. the near-synonymous great, awesome, excellent, etc.) and tend to occur at the end of a phrase. The hypothesis predicts that higher speech rates lead to the use of adjectives that are generally more frequent.
Speech rate is operationalized as the rate of articulation (syllables per second) in an intonation unit, excluding the predicative adjective itself. The rate is measured as relative to the speaker’s base line, i.e. their overall mean speech rate in the entire conversation. The frequency of each predicative adjective has been extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008-), assuming that this very large corpus approximates the frequencies of items in the language at large.

Results indicate that there is indeed a positive correlation of speech rate and adjective frequency, which, however, is sensitive to other factors, especially a ‘priming effect’ where adjectives are repeated from prior discourse. This by and large confirms the hypothesis, but suggests that lexical retrieval in speech production is guided by many different aspects simultaneously. As the scope of this study is limited to predicative adjectives in American English, the question to what extent a correlation of speech rate and item frequency may hold in other contexts remains open.
On methodological grounds, the study shows, firstly, that psycholinguistic hypotheses mainly derived from experimental studies can be tested in natural speech data from corpora; and secondly, that the roles of speech rate and frequency in language production merit further attention.


References:

Arnon, Inbal & Uriel Cohen Priva. 2013. “More than words: The effect of multi-word frequency and constituency on phonetic duration”. Language and Speech 56:3. 349-371.
Arnon, Inbal & Neal Snider. 2010. “More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases”. Journal of Memory and Language 62. 67-82.
Bybee, Joan. 2006. “From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition”. Language 82:4. 711-733.
Davies, Mark. 2008-. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
Dell, Gary S., and Jean K. Gordon. 2003. "Neighbors in the lexicon: Friends or foes?" In Niels O. Schiller & Antje S. Meyer (eds.), Phonetics and Phonology in Language Comprehension and Production. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 9-38.
Diessel, Holger. 2007. “Frequency effects in language acquisition, language use, and diachronic change”. New Ideas in Psychology 25. 108-127.
Du Bois, John W., Chafe, Wallace L., Meyer, Charles, Thompson, Sandra A., Marty, Nii & Englebretson, Robert. 2000-2005. The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts 1-4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Gahl, Susanne, & Susan M. Garnsey. 2004. “Knowledge of grammar, knowledge of usage: Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation”. Language 80:4. 748–775.
Jurafsky, Daniel, Alan Bell, Michelle Gregory & William Raymond. 2001. “Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production”. In Joan Bybee & Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 229–254.

This is a glossary of basic R commands/functions that I have used to introduce R to students. It is meant to help beginners to work with data in R, in addition to face-to-face tutoring and demonstration.
Feel free to use it for your own purposes.
Comments and suggestions are welcome!
(Updated to version 1.4, January 2017)

This article investigates the emergence and early use of possessive HAVE got in English. Two hypotheses about its emergence are tested on historical data (c.1460–1760). One hypothesis is based on communicative functionality, suggesting that got was inserted as a 'pattern preserver' to compensate for the increased reduction of HAVE. The other hypothesis invokes the conventionalization of an invited inference, thus a (non-functional) semantic shift which does not immediately serve to support a communicative function. The diachronic evidence is found to support only the latter hypothesis. In the second part the early stage of the variation of HAVE and HAVE got is investigated (c.1720–1750). The results show a strong register difference, but also a division of labor between the variants that can be explained by the syntactic and semantic properties of HAVE got as having emerged out of a present perfect of get. Thus, the variation is organized in a functionally motivated way. It is concluded that in the development of possessive HAVE got functional constraints apply to the variation early on, but do not play an evident role in the emergence of the new variant. This suggests that functional motivations are a directing force but not necessarily a driving force in language change.

The guiding question of this paper is how (horizontal) connections are established when new items enter the network of constructions. It presents a quantitative, corpus-based study of the development of to-contraction (e.g. want to > wanna) in American English since the 19th century. From a plethora of earlier forms, gonna, wanna and gotta emerge, first as representations of phonetic reduction, but in time claiming their place as newly emerged, separate nodes in the constructional network. As their frequency increases, their usage patterns (relative to the full form) become increasingly similar. I propose that this marks the emergence of a horizontal link, which can be described as an emerging 'meta-construction'. The study discusses the status of these forms as either phonetic variants, potential allostructions, or independent form-meaning pairings, and provides first-hand evidence for emergent connections via mechanisms of analogy in language. Moreover, it makes an argument that (changing) usage patterns reflect (changing) constructional links and degrees of entrenchment.

There is ample psycholinguistic evidence that speakers behave efficiently, using shorter and less effortful constructions when the meaning is more predictable, and longer and more effortful ones when it is less predictable. However, the Principle of No Synonymy requires that all formally distinct variants should also be functionally different. The question is how much two related constructions should overlap semantically and pragmatically in order to be used for the purposes of efficient communication. The case study focuses on want to + Infinitive and its reduced variant with wanna, which have different stylistic and sociolinguistic connotations. Bayesian mixed-effects regression modelling based on the spoken part of the British National Corpus reveals a very limited effect of efficiency: predictability increases the chances of the reduced variant only in fast speech. We conclude that efficient use of more and less effortful variants is restricted when two variants are associated w...

This paper addresses the issue of coalescence of frequent collocations and its consequences for their realization and mental representation. The items examined are ‘semi-modal’ instantiations of the type V-to-Vinf, namely have to, used to, trying to and need to, in American English. We explore and compare their realization variants in speech, considering the effects of speech-internal and extra-linguistic factors (speech rate, stress accent, phonological context, speech situation, age of the speaker), as well as possible effects of analogy with established contractions like gonna, wanna. Our findings show a high degree of coalescence in the items under study, but no clear pattern of contraction. The propensity for contraction in analogy to gonna/wanna is strongly affected by phonological properties – it is inhibited by the presence of a fricative in have/used to. Moreover, the most frequent reduced realizations are conservative in terms of transparency and still allow morphological ...

Following the quantitative turn in linguistics, the field appears to be in a methodological “wild west” state where much is possible and new frontiers are being explored, but there is relatively little guidance in terms of firm rules or conventions. In this article, we focus on the issue of variable selection in regression modeling. It is common to aim for a “minimal adequate model” and eliminate “non-significant” variables by statistical procedures. We advocate an alternative, “deductive modeling” approach that retains a “full” model of variables generated from our research questions and objectives. Comparing the statistical model to a camera, i.e., a tool to produce an image of reality, we contrast the deductive and predictive (minimal) modeling approaches on a dataset from a corpus study. While a minimal adequate model is more parsimonious, its selection procedure is blind to the research aim and may conceal relevant information. Deductive models, by contrast, are grounded in the...

In grammaticalization, functional reanalysis and formal reduction are often regarded as elements of a unified diachronic process, though rooted in general communicative and cognitive preferences. The present study tests these claims in synchronic language use by investigating potential cases of grammaticalization. Epistemic phrases of the type (it) could/might be (that) in English are potential candidates for grammaticalizing into sentence adverb(ial)s. The question is whether shorter forms (here, it-omission) are preferred in potentially grammaticalizing contexts, e.g. modifying a main clause ((it) could be this is correct). I first summarize a corpus study, where overall higher rates of it-omission are found in critical context across items (could be, might be) and register (spoken, informal writing). A 'continuous shadowing' experiment partly confirms this finding but also shows that speakers/hearers are both more flexible and more conservative with could/might be than with maybe / it may be that. The findings suggest that grammaticalizing contexts have an immediate effect on formal reduction even in the absence of change, and that language users have an active intuition for emerging variational patterns.

Review of the monograph:
David Correia Saavedra. Measurements of grammaticalization: Developing a quantitative index for the study of grammatical change, 2021. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp.  xii + 246. €114.95, ISBN: 9783110752946.

(Open access by the link given)