Plenary Abstract: Prof. Dr. Joan Bresnan

The present study investigates whether there are living syntactic frequency effects in
English `have' and 'be' contraction, using data from the Buckeye Corpus of conversational
Midwestern North American English (Pitt et al. 2007).  ``Living'' effects arise during
active language processing of spontaneous multi-word expressions, in contrast to the
products of diachronic coalescence of several forms into fused units (e.g. Bybee and
Sheibmann 1999) or unproductive stored routines (Bybee & Thompson 2000).

Previous research has found a number of predictors of variable `have' and `be'
contraction: preceding segment phonology, following constituent category, length of
subject in words, n-gram measures of information load, and joint frequency with the host
(Labov 1969; McElhinney 1993; Krug 1998; Frank & Jaeger 2009; Barth 2011; MacKenzie
2012). However, the findings of frequency effects in subject-verb contraction are
contested, and largely driven by pronoun hosts, which dominate the probability
distribution and are most subject to diachronic coalescence with the auxiliary verbs.

To probe for ``living'' syntactic frequency effects on contraction, we first studied
datasets of pronouns contracting with HAVE and BE, and then studied `is' contraction with
non-pronoun, lexical subjects, using a linear combination of the reliable predictors of
previous studies, including frequency.  We found that the effect of joint probability of
contraction is not a binary high/low effect, but appears to be a pervasive property
through the frequency range.  Hence, joint frequency of host and auxiliary affects not
just the products of diachronic coalescence of words into fused units which may be stored
rather than computed compositionally, it has effects on living multiword syntactic
alternations.

Selected References  

Barth, D. 2011. Modeling reduction of `is', `am' and `are' in grammaticalized
constructions. Quantitative Issues in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL) 4: 4-13.

Bybee, J. and Sheibman (1999) The effect of usage on degree of constituency: the reduction
of don't in American English.  Linguistics 37: 575-596.

Bybee, J., and S. Thompson. 1997. Three frequency effects in syntax. In Proceedings of the
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on
Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (BLS) 23: 378-388.

Frank, A., and T. F. Jaeger. 2008. Speaking rationally: Uniform information density as an
optimal strategy for language production. In The 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society (CogSci08), 939-944, Washington, D.C., July.

Krug, M. (1998).  String Frequency, A Cognitive Mot ivating Factor in Coalesence, Language
Processing, and Linguistic Change.  Journal of English Linguistics, 26(4): 286-320.

Labov, W. (1969). Contraction, Deletion and Inhere nt Variability of the English Copula.
Language 45(4): 715-762.

MacKenzie, L. (2012). Locating Variation Above the Phonology. (Doctoral dissertation).
University of Pennsylvania.

McElhinny, B. (1993). Copula and Auxiliary Contrac tion in the Speech of White Americans.
American Speech 68(4): 371-399.

Pitt, M., K. Johnson, E. Hume, S. Kiesling, & W. Raymond. 2005. The Buckeye corpus of
conversational speech: labeling conventions and a test of transcriber reliability. Speech
Communication 45(1):89-95.

Keywords: auxiliary contraction, frequency, syntax, probability