Between context and community: Regional variation in register effects in the English dative alternation

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between the stylistic context of utterance production and the language user’s regional background as influencing factors in one syntactic alternation, i.e., variation between the double object and the prepositional dative construction. To that end, this chapter zooms in on (1) the competition between stylistic context and regional community regarding dative choice, (2) cross-regional inter-register variation, and (3) register-specific coherence (aka intra-register variation). Comparing data from nine varieties of English using corpora that presumably share the same structure (and registers) reveals that community is more important than context, that the effect of register is regionally variable and that registers are largely but not fully coherent. These findings do not only stress the variable nature of probabilistic grammars but also point to the importance of regional effects when studying register variation (all scripts at https://​osf​.io​/3djkr/).