David Tizón-Couto

University of Vigo | UVIGO · Department of English, French and German Philology

This multifactorial study reviews the determinants of particle alternation after uninflected try in varieties where English is native. The effects of a number of previously discussed and novel predictors are probed in data from well-known corpora. The results confirm the inclinations of North American varieties ( try to ) in contrast with those of...

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...

We review reduction and contraction in modalizing expressions of the type V-to-Vinf from the perspective of production, perception and mental representation. A corpus study of spoken American English shows reduction/contraction as a continuous process which is subject to phonological and communicative constraints. Generally, reduction (articulatory...

Holger Diessel, The grammar network: How linguistic structure is shaped by language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 289. ISBN 9781108671040. - David Tizón-Couto

Frequently used linguistic structures become entrenched in memory; this is often assumed to make their consecutive parts more predictable, as well as fuse them into a single unit (chunking). High frequency moreover leads to a propensity for phonetic reduction. We present a word recognition experiment which tests how frequency information (string fr...

This paper explores the potential of corpus data to account for language users' mental representations of a high frequency item that is prone to phonetic reduction. It presents an analysis of the realizations of semi-modal have to in spoken American English, which is a candidate for to-contraction (viz. wanna, gotta) but has no clearly established...

This paper investigates the diachronic development of strings that include both a left-dislocated constituent and a coreferring resumptive in the subsequent clause, thus resembling the reportedly speech-like and informal contemporary Left Dislocation construction. The data is analyzed according to a range of factors relating to the inner configurat...

This study deals with the complexity of left-dislocated [LDed] noun phrases in the Modern English period (1500–1914). The purpose is twofold: to estimate the effects of a number of theoretically relevant predictors on complexity, operationalized as word-length, and to explore whether shorter LDed NPs, which are characteristic of contemporary spoken...

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, consi...

This paper investigates sequences featuring a coreferential link between a left-detached constituent and a resumptive in the following main clause [‘LDet-sequences’]. Their syntactic, semantic and textual behaviour is investigated in historically recent texts (since Modern English) where such detachments are not generally expected to replicate the...

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As part of a major project on the syntactic organisation of written discourse in the recent history of the English language, this paper tackles the distribution of sentences comprising left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined, this investiga...