Syntactic variation across the grammar: modelling a complex adaptive system

Abstract

While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures at different levels of abstraction, is reduced to a few disconnected variables. This paper quantifies the impact of such reductions by systematically modelling dialectal variation across 49 local populations of English speakers in 16 countries. We perform dialect classification with both an entire grammar as well as with isolated nodes within the grammar in order to characterize the syntactic differences between these dialects. The results show, first, that many individual nodes within the grammar are subject to variation but, in isolation, none perform as well as the grammar as a whole. This indicates that an important part of syntactic variation consists of interactions between different parts of the grammar. Second, the results show that the similarity between dialects depends heavily on the sub-set of the grammar being observed: for example, New Zealand English could be more similar to Australian English in phrasal verbs but at the same time more similar to UK English in dative phrases.