Team
Affiliated members: Mikko Laitinen, Magnus Levin & Elizaveta Smirnova
The project
This project aims to explore both linguistic complexity and diatopic variation in English in relation to the phenomenon of subject-predicate agreement and to make available on an online platform the resulting database with data extracted from a corpus of contemporary Englishes. The project will apply multifactorial/multivariate models to the data extracted from the corpus in order
to identify the factors that determine variation in subject-predicate agreement. Specifically, it will explore variation in verbal agreement in number with simple and complex subjects (with dependents, in coordination) in both unmarked (canonical) sentences (SV(X)) and thematically-marked sentences (inversion, existential constructions, clefts) in the 20 varieties of English represented in the Corpus Global Web-based English (GloWbE).The topic will be approached from a multidimensional perspective, carrying out detailed quantitative, qualitative and statistical analyses of the morphosyntactic factors, especially those related to linguistic complexity, and lexical-semantic factors that potentially determine verb number. The ultimate goal is to characterise subject-predicate agreement in English based on data from real contexts in different diatopic varieties of the language in order to contribute to a theory of complexity, and linguistic and diatopic variation.
Previous research has highlighted the need for in-depth analyses of both intralinguistic factors and diatopic variation, not only in native varieties of English but also in non-native varieties, as they have not been explored empirically. It is also necessary to interpret the results in light of cognitivist theories that have addressed morphosyntactic complexity issues, as these play a prominent role in explaining the focus of this project. Building on that previous research in the field, this project aims to demonstrate that agreement patterns (i) can be modelled by factors affecting the language system, (ii) are influenced by the greater or lesser complexity of the subject and clausal construction, and (iii) vary according to the variety of English.