MoVE: Extra-linguistic triggers of Morphosyntactic Variation in Englishes

Project summary: 

The project investigates the interactions between extra-linguistic triggers (such as the proportion of non-native speakers, official bilingualism in a country, or the Gross Domestic Income of a country) and their relationship with observed variation in language complexity. 

Language complexity is usually defined in terms of how difficult a language is to acquire for adult learners, or in terms of the number of rules or grammatical distinctions (i.e. more are more complex) a language exhibits. Language complexity has been a hot and controversial topic in the past few years and continues to fascinate researchers from various disciplines such as language variation, cross-linguistic typology, and language evolution. Given the vast amount of empirical research on language complexity, it is surprising that next to nothing is known about how such extra-linguistic triggers interact, and how exactly they are related to language complexity. Previous research has proposed many extra-linguistic triggers and many more operationalisations of these triggers to explain variation in language complexity but so far their (inter)dependencies have not been systematically scrutinised.

Against this backdrop,  MoVE offers the first systematic empirical analysis of the interactions between a wide range of extra-linguistic triggers and their relationship with variation in language complexity. In addressing this major gap, the project will advance theorising about the intersections between language variation, complexity and language evolution. To achieve its objectives the project draws on cutting-edge methodologies ranging from multivariate analysis techniques to information-theory, and pursues an ambitious empirical agenda: focusing on aggregate morphosyntactic complexity in spontaneous spoken varieties of English (e.g. Scottish English, Indian English, Kenyan English), the project covers a wide range of old and new extra-linguistic triggers and combines atlas-based information with corpus analysis.

The two major objectives of the project are:

(1) to unravel the interactions between extra-linguistic triggers,

(2) and to  analyse the relationship between extra-linguistic triggers and aggregate morphosyntactic complexity in varieties of English.

Based on the various contact scenarios described in the literature (e.g. Trudgill 2011) and recent empirical suggestions (e.g. Kauhanen et al. 2023; Koplenig 2019), the working hypothesis is that contact (as non-native acquisition) and population size (of both native and non-native speaker communities) are two major triggers whose interplay affects complexity in varieties of English.

Funding: 

• Fritz Thyssen Foundation Support of projects (grant no. 20.23.0.009SL)