Hollmann and Siewierska 2011 DAR Lancs

1 The status of frequency, schemas,
2
and identity in Cognitive Sociolinguistics:
3
A case study on definite article reduction*
4
5 WILLEM B. HOLLMANN and ANNA SIEWIERSKA
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 Abstract
13
14 This article contributes to the nascent field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. In
15 particular, we are interested in how usage-based cognitive linguistics and vari-
16 ationist sociolinguistics may enrich each other. We first discuss some of the
17 ways in which variationist insights have led cognitive linguists such as Gries
18 (e.g. 2003) and Grondelaers et al. (e.g. 2008) to pay attention to language-
19 external factors (such as medium, region, and register), thereby greatly en-
20 hancing the description and understanding of certain grammatical phenomena.
21 The focus then shifts to cognitive linguistic work (by Hollmann and Siewierska
22 2007 and Clark and Trousdale 2009) which has implications for sociolinguis-
23 tic theory. The two usage-based concepts that have proved especially relevant
24 in this connection are frequency effects and schemas. The article explores and
25 illustrates the role of these two factors in relation to linguistic variation by
26 means of a new case study on definite article reduction (DAR) in Lancashire
27 dialect, a variety spoken in the North West of England. A twofold conclusion is
28 drawn: first, a symbiotic relation between cognitive and sociolinguistics seems
29 possible, but second, in order for this relation to be truly mutually beneficial
30 variationists should get involved in the Cognitive Sociolinguistic enterprise
31 much more than is currently the case.
32
33 Keywords: Cognitive Sociolinguistics, Definite Article Reduction, frequency
34 effects, Lancashire dialect, schemas
35
36
37 1. Cognitive sociolinguistics: The state of the art
38
In mainstream cognitive linguistic circles it has been recognised for quite some
39
time that language should not be studied as a solely mental phenomenon, but
40
41
42 * Email: <w.hollmann@lancaster.ac.uk>; <a.siewierska@lancaster.ac.uk>
Cognitive Linguistics 22–1 (2011), 25–54 0936–5907/11/0022–0025

DOI 10.1515/COGL.2011.002 © Walter de Gruyter
(InDesign) WDG (155×230mm) TimesNewRoman J-2382 COGL 22:1 (IDP) PMU: A1 19/11/2010 HC1: WSL 30/11/2010 pp. 25–54 (p. 25) 2382_22-1_02
26 W. B. Hollmann and A. Siewierska
1 as a social activity as well. Consider for example the following quote from
2 Langacker:
3
4 Articulating the dynamic nature of conceptual and grammatical structure leads us in-
5 exorably to the dynamics of discourse and social interaction. While these too have been
6 part of Cognitive Grammar from the very onset, they have certainly not received the
7 emphasis they deserve. (1999: 376)
8
9 Kristiansen and Dirven describe this suggestion as “programmatic” (2008: 1)
10 and they are quite right in doing so, for neither here — nor indeed in more re-
11 cent work by Langacker (e.g. 2008) and many other cognitive linguists — is the
12 social dimension elaborated on in any more detail.
13 The (2008) volume by Kristiansen and Dirven represents a landmark publi-
14 cation ina recent trend towards what is becoming known as ‘cognitive socio-
15 linguistics’. This trend is being continued by Geeraerts et al. (2010), but goes
16 back to research on the connection between social and linguistic cognition by
17 e.g. Kristiansen (2003, 2006) on phonology, Geeraerts et al. (1994) on lexis,
18 and finally Gries (1999, 2001, 2002, 2003), Grondelaers (e.g. 2000) and Holl-
19 mann and Siewierska (2006, 2007) on grammar. Hudson’s work in Word
20 Grammar (e.g. 1996, 2007a, 2007b) deserves to be mentioned in this connec-
21 tion as well, as a rare example of a cognitive linguistic theory that accords a
22 clearly defined status to the social value of linguistic expressions as part of
23 speakers’ grammatical knowledge. The body of cognitive sociolinguistic re-
24 search cited thus far is similar in that it marries (some version of ) cognitive
25 linguistic theory with insights from variationist sociolinguistics, including
26 non-linguistic parameters such as medium, region, gender, and age.
27 In tandem with this development there are also a number of cognitive lin-
28 guists, such as Croft (2009, 2010), Sinha (1999, 2004), and Verhagen (2005),
29 who have argued for a move beyond the purely individual mental level to con-
30 siderations related to language as an intersubjective activity, i.e. as the negotia-
31 tion of meaning between speaker and hearer. Croft (2009) has termed this ‘a
32 social cognitive linguistics’, and given the slightly less broad scope than the
33 cognitive sociolinguistic studies cited, which study language in society rather
34 than just in instances of speaker-hearer interaction, it may make sense to main-
35 tain the terminological distinction that has thus emerged.
36 The focus of the present paper is on the interface between the cognitive,
37 usage-based study of grammar (as opposed to e.g. lexis) and the factors known
38 from variationist sociolinguistics to play a role in motivating language struc-
39 ture and use. In particular, the question will be to what extent usage-based and
40 sociolinguistic theory may enrich each other. We will argue that while thus far
41 aspects of sociolinguistic theory have by and large informed cognitive linguists
42 (in terms of research design and analysis), cognitive linguistics actually also
(InDesign) WDG (155×230mm) TimesNewRoman J-2382 COGL 22:1 (IDP) PMU: A1 19/11/2010 HC1: WSL 30/11/2010 pp. 26–54 (p. 26) 2382_22-1_02 (InDesig
The status of frequency, schemas, and identity 27
1 offers several insights that may feed back into sociolinguistic theory. One log-
2 ical conclusion will be that sociolinguists would do well to acquaint them-
3 selves better with the cognitive, usage-based models of language than is pres-
4 ently the case.
5 The remainder of this article will start with an overview of some of the main
6 advances in cognitive sociolinguistics (in particular, by Gries and by Gronde-
7 laers and colleagues), which will show the sense in which variationist sociolin-
8 guistics has usefully fed into cognitive linguistic research.1 After this the focus
9 will shift to possible ways in which a usage-based view of grammar may, in its
10 turn, contribute to sociolinguistic theory. We will first briefly discus some
11 already published work (by Hollmann and Siewierska 2007 and Clark and
12 Trousdale 2009) (section 3). Both of these highlight token frequency as an
13 explanatory factor in regard to patterns of variation of change, while Hollmann
14 and Siewierska also discuss the role of schemas. We will then move on to a
15 new case study on so-called definite article reduction (DAR) in Lancashire
16 dialect, a phenomenon which has recently attracted a lot of attention but never
17 from a usage-based, cognitive angle (section 4). This study will yield further
18 evidence concerning the role of frequency, schemas, and ( perhaps) identity as
19 well.
20
21
2. Variationist sociolinguistic influences on cognitive linguistics
22
23 2.1. Gries (2001, 2002, 2003)

24
In a series of publications, Gries has examined factors influencing the place-
25
ment of particles in English transitive phrasal verb constructions. The variation
26
is as follows (from Gries 1999: 109–110):
27
28 (1) Fred picked up the book.

29 (2) Fred picked the book up.
30 (3) He brought back the books that he had left at home for so long.
31 (4) ??He brought the books that he had left at home for so long back.
32
Gries’s original (1999) study approached the variation from a purely cognitive-
33
functional perspective on intralinguistic variables such as the length and com-
34
plexity of the object of the verb, and whether its referent is concrete or abstract.
35
Subsequently, however, he broadened his scope so as to include the extralin-
36
guistic factor of medium, i.e. spoken vs written (cf. 2001, 2002, 2003).
37
In terms of cognitive-functional considerations, Gries proposes that speakers
38
will tend to maximise ease of processing. Processing cost is operationalised by
39
40
41 1. The work by Croft (and others) in ‘social cognitive linguistics’ falls outside the scope of this
42 section, but for an overview and appraisal see Hollmann (to appear).
22-1_02 (InDesign) WDG (155×230mm) TimesNewRoman J-2382 COGL 22:1 (IDP) PMU: A1 19/11/2010 HC1: WSL 30/11/2010 pp. 27–54 (p. 27) 2382_22-1_02
1 analyzing the order displayed by (1) and (3) as easier than that in (2) and the
2 marginal example (4), because the former pattern does not involve a wait for
3 the particle: the verb-particle combination is immediately available. Gries then
4 hypothesises that the more difficult order of (2) and (4) should occur relatively
5 often only if the direct object is easy to process (as is the case with the book),
6 whereas processing-heavy objects (e.g. long and complex phrases such as the
7 books that he had left at home for so long) will tend to favour the order exem-
8 plified by (1) and (3). Using a corpus of 403 examples taken from the British
9 National Corpus, Gries concludes that this is indeed the case. In addition, he
10 finds that in written discourse the order of (1) and (3) is predominant, with the
11 preference being reversed in speech.
12 Gries does not only look at the role of variables such as object length, com-
13 plexity and concreteness in isolation, but he also assesses possible combined
14 effects by employing multivariate analysis. The precise details of his findings
15 are less important than the parallels between his work and that of research in
16 variationist sociolinguistics. That is, while Gries himself compares his method
17 to Biber’s (1988) multivariate analysis of the grammar across different text
18 types, it is also very reminiscent of work in the so-called language variation
19 and change paradigm, e.g. Tagliamonte et al. (1997) and Cheshire and Fox
20 (2009).
21 To sum up, Gries’s research on particle placement has benefitted from
22 studies that go beyond intralinguistic variables, whilst also showing similari-
23 ties to the variationist tradition in terms of the statistical method used.
24
25 2.2. Grondelaers (2000), Grondelaers and Brysbaert (1996), Grondelaers
26 et al. (2006, 2008)
27
28 The work by Grondelaers (and colleagues) on Dutch er-presentative construc-
29 tions is also heavily influenced, with respect to its statistical analysis, by varia-
30 tionist sociolinguistics. Just as in the case of Gries’s work, multivariate analysis
31 of various factors, both intra- and extra-linguistic, helps shed light on a case of
32 linguistic variation. The variation in question concerns the absence or pres-
33 ence, in between the verb and the subject, of er ‘there’ in adjunct-initial presen-
34 tatives such as (5–8), (from Grondelaers et al. 2008: 158, who do not gloss er
35 as ‘there’):
36
37 (5) In 1977 was er een fusie tussen Materne en Confilux.
38 in 1977 was there a merger between Materne and Confilux
39 ‘In 1977 there followed a merger between Materne and Confilux.’
40 (6) Morgen volgt een extra ministerraad.
41 tomorrow follows an additional cabinet meeting
42 ‘Tomorrow there is an extra cabinet meeting.’
1 (7) In ons land is er nog altijd geen openbaar golfterrein.

2 in our country is there still no public golf course
3 ‘In our country there still is no public golf course.’
4 (8) In het redactielokaal staan enkele flessen wijn en wat borrelhapjes.
5 in the newsroom stand some bottles of wine and some appetizers
6 ‘In the newsroom there are some bottles of wine and some appetizers.’
7
Compared to Gries, Grondelaers and his co-workers go further in relation to
8
the range of extra-linguistic factors included. The extra-linguistic factors es-
9
sentially comprise register (where they distinguish between three levels of for-
10
mality) and region ( Netherlandic vs. Belgian Dutch) but these are further con-
11
nected to the rather different histories of the two varieties in question, as we
12
shall discuss.
13
A variety of linguistic factors are shown to play a role, especially the locative
14
vs. temporal semantics of the initial adjuncts. Locative adjuncts are seen as bet-
15
ter predictors of the following subjects than temporal ones. Er being more fre-
16
quent in sentences with temporal adjuncts, the suggestion is that it essentially
17
functions as an “inaccessibility marker” (Grondelaers et al. 2008: 170), that is
18
to say a cue to the listener that activating the mental representation associated
19
with the subject will require a relatively high degree of processing effort.
20
Evidence is found in the Belgian Dutch data that er is also a marker of infor-
21
mality, but in Netherlandic Dutch there is no register variation. Furthermore,
22
Grondelaers et al. observe that in Netherlandic Dutch the distribution of er is
23
generally far more predictable than in the Belgian variety. They offer the fol-
24
lowing social-historical explanation for the messier picture obtaining in Bel-
25
gian Dutch:
26
27
Whereas — in a nutshell — Netherlandic Dutch benefitted from a normal standardiza-
28
tionwhich was finished at the beginning of the 20th C, the standardization of Belgian
29
Dutch wasblocked in the 16th C as a result of political and social factors, resuming its
30 course only in the 20th C. (Grondelaers et al. 2008: 186)
31
32 By thus broadening the range of factors beyond strictly cognitive-functional
33 ones, Grondelaers and his colleagues have managed to shed much light on an
34 area of Dutch grammar previously shrouded in darkness; compare the relatively
35 vague description in the standard reference grammar by Haeseryn et al. (1997).
36
37
3. Usage-based implications for variationist sociolinguistics:
38
The role of frequency
39
40 It is widely recognized by proponents of the usage-based model that token
41 frequency is crucial in the organisation of linguistic knowledge (see e.g.
42 Schuchardt 1885; Zipf 1935; Fidelholtz 1975; Hooper 1976; Bybee and
1 Scheibman 1999; Berkenfield 2001). By contrast, it is often ignored by

2 sociolinguists — or sometimes even to some extent denied, cf. Labov (2006).
3 Usage-based work on the role of token frequency is usually carried out on
4 standard varieties or without any consideration for any possible standard vs.
5 non-standard variation present in the data (see further section 4.3.4). This
6 section highlights two published studies in cognitive sociolinguistics which
7 suggest that token frequency also plays a role in aspects of variation in non-
8 standard varieties.
9
10 3.1. Hollmann and Siewierska (2007)

11
Hollmann and Siewierska (2007) investigate variation in the realisation of
12
the 1Sg possessive pronoun in Lancashire dialect. Using data from a corpus
13
that is based on the North West Sound Archive,2 they find that apart from the
14
standard pronunciation with two vocalic segments, as in example (9), Lan-
15
cashire speakers display three reduced variants, as in examples (10 –12):
16
17 (9) . . . I couldn’t play for them because they couldn’t afford my/[maɪ] foot-
18 ballshoes (JA)
19 (10) I was so young then like and er me/[mi] brothertook the opportunity and
20 he went (HF)
21 (11) when I was four I used to go round this house with my/[ma] eyesclosed
22 (RG)
23 (12) I remember my/[mǝ] fathercoming out a small room (CS)
24
Hollmann and Siewierska show that in their data frequent nouns co-occur
25
significantly more frequently with reduced possessives than less frequent
26
nouns. This is of course exactly what the usage-based model would predict, but
27
it would not normally be suggested, or even explored, in sociolinguistic work.
28
Hollmann and Siewierska pursue another line of explanation as well, based
29
on the notion of alienability, well-known in linguistic typology (see e.g. the
30
contributions in Chappell and McGregor 1996). The Lancashire data pattern
31
such that inalienable nouns (body parts and kinship terms) prefer reduced
32
forms of the possessive more than do alienable nouns. However, the authors
33
refer to work by Haspelmath (2006), who has suggested that frequency actu-
34
ally underlies the alienability effects, in that inalienable nouns tend to be very
35
frequent as well.
36
Although frequency does a good job of explaining the variation in the Lan-
37
cashire data, Hollmann and Siewierska are left with a few nouns that despite
38
39
40
2. See Hollmann and Siewierska (2006) and section 4.3, for details about the corpus. Unless
41 otherwise indicated all examples in this and subsequent sections are from this corpus. Speakers
42 are identified by their initials.
1 their relatively low frequency nonetheless tend to co-occur with reduced 1Sg
2 possessives, such as stepfather, niece, and child. They note, however, that these
3 are all kinship terms, and that it is therefore possible that speakers have a pro-
4 ductive schema specifying the combination of kinship terms in general with a
5 reduced form of my. Despite the relatively low frequency of a few kinship
6 terms, these would then inherit the reduced possessive from the schema. The
7 notion of a schema is of course another part of cognitive linguistic theory, and
8 so this is another illustration of the way in which this approach may enrich
9 variationist sociolinguistics.
10
11
3.2. Clark and Trousdale (2009)
12
13 Token frequency is also a central concern in Clark and Trousdale’s (2009)
14 study on TH-fronting in Fife, in east-central Scotland. TH-fronting is the phe-
15 nomenon whereby the interdental fricative [θ] in words such as thing, mara-
16 thon, and Keith is fronted to labiodental [f ]. Some studies on the phenomenon
17 also include the fronting of the voiced counterpart, i.e. [ð] > [v], but Clark and
18 Trousdale exclude this.
19 The authors observe that the determinant factors that are normally investi-
20 gated in relation to TH-fronting are mainly social (age, gender, social class),
21 and to a much lesser extent linguistic (e.g. position of (th) in the word, lexical
22 category of the word). Their study improves on this by considering, for the first
23 time, token frequency, as well as other factors, both linguistic (e.g. absence or
24 presence of [f ] earlier in the same word, position of (th) immediately before or
25 after a word boundary) and social (e.g. friendship group membership, area of
26 residence). The corpus used is a 360,000 word collection of conversations; for
27 more details see Clark and Trousdale (2009: 36 –37).
28 Clark and Trousdale find that while the most important factors are social
29 (especially friendship group membership) and linguistic (most notably, pre-
30 ceding [f ] in the word), token frequency does play a role. The picture that
31 emerges here is quite complex, however. Simplifying matters slightly, there is
32 evidence to suggest that more frequent items feature [f ] more often than less
33 frequent words. However, the very highly frequent words with, think, and thing
34 (and derivatives such as something) do not. Instead, [f ] in these words displays
35 variation with [h], [ʔ], and zero. Clark and Trousdale suggest that this latter
36 variation can be analysed as cases of phonological reduction. In support of this,
37 they show that for the thing-derivatives the proportion of zero realisations in-
38 creases with the token frequency of the derivates in question. For example,
39 something, the most frequent derivative, features zero in more than half the
40 cases, whereas in the less frequent word nothing zeroes account for only just
41 over twenty per cent of the cases. These findings are in line with the predictions
42 made by the usage-based model.
1 In contrast to this case of reduction, Clark and Trousdale (2009: 49) suggest
2 that the TH-fronting evident in other words “is not a phonetically motivated
3 sound change”, but instead “a straightforward case of lexical diffusion or ‘the
4 abrupt substitution of one phoneme for another in words that contain that pho-
5 neme’ (Labov 1994: 524)”. They conclude that their TH-fronting data “do
6 show frequency effects but these are not entirely in line with what has been
7 predicted based on previous research [i.e. within the usage-based model, WBH
8 and AS] on the progression of sound change and lexical frequency” (Clark and
9 Trousdale 2009: 52).
10 Although Clark and Trousdale invoke token frequency to explain at least
11 part of their data (especially reduction in with, think, and thing and derivatives)
12 we would argue that perhaps it also plays a role in relation to the remaining
13 data, which they consider to be problematic. It has often been noted in the
14 functional and typological literature on phonology that interdental fricatives
15 are crosslinguistically uncommon and typically acquired late (e.g. Dubois and
16 Horvath 2004: 411). And on a related note, the change from [θ] to [f ] (as well
17 as [ð] to [v]) is often analysed as “natural” (in the sense of e.g. Blevins 2008;
18 see also Blevins 2006: 11–12 for changes specifically concerning interdental
19 fricatives). The phonetic reason for this change, it is usually argued (e.g. Ohala
20 1974; Blevins 2006, 2008), lies in the perceptual similarity of the two sounds.
21 With regard to the “unexpected” frequency effect observed by Clark and
22 Trousdale in words other than with, think, and thing, we suggest that in rela-
23 tively frequent words there are more occasions for mishearing the interdental
24 as the labiodental fricative. Therefore, the differential rates of TH-fronting in
25 the words in question are perhaps not unexpected after all. Yet regardless of
26 whether our alternative approach is on the right track or not, the main point that
27 we wish to make here is that in relation to Clark and Trousdale’s data the
28 usage-based model once again adds an extra explanatory tier on top of the
29 theoretical apparatus of variationist sociolinguistics.
30
31
4. Case study: Definite article reduction (DAR) in Lancashire dialect
32
33 This section presents a corpus-based case study on definite article reduction
34 (DAR) in Lancashire dialect. The study in question is fairly small-scale and the
35 conclusions are therefore tentative. However, it is not meant as the definitive ac-
36 count of DAR, but rather as a demonstration of how the interface between cog-
37 nitive linguistic and sociolinguistic theory may be explored in both directions.
38
39
4.1. The problem
40
41 Definite article reduction is the phenomenon whereby the definite article is
42 reduced to a vowel-less form. This happens in several northern English dia-
1 lects, and is associated especially with Yorkshire and Lancashire, where it has
2 even been characterised as a stereotyped feature (Jones 2002: 325). DAR has
3 been around for several centuries, and is often represented in literary dialect by
4 certain reduced spellings, see for example Emily Brönte’s rendering of York-
5 shire dialect in Wuthering Heights:
6
(13) “T’ maister’s down i’ t’ fowld. Go round by th’ end ot’ laith, if you want
7
to spake to him.” (Brönte, 1847: 24)
8
9 For some current examples, this time from Lancashire, consider:

10
(14) Oh yes yes they were a primary school (.) Miss Riley she were er (.) er
11
in the/[θ]infants you see and then you went up into the[ʔ]big school
12
(ED)
13
(15) go through Townley Park (.) and Mr McKay were the/[t] er park keeper
14
then (ED)
15
(16) No it were ni-- it were nice because they had them big pipes (.) ‘cos we
16
had them big pipes in the/[ʔ]greenhouses up the/øsmallholdings you
17
know them big (ED)
18
19 Two points are worth making in relation to these examples. First, DAR does
20 not always happen and thus has the status of an optional process — speakers
21 clearly have the full form at their disposal as well (see also Jones 1999: 103–
22 104). In fact many Lancashire speakers use the full form very often or even
23 exclusively, a finding that mirrors the findings of Tagliamonte and Roeder’s
24 York study (see 2009: 447). Second, in addition to vowel-less forms we also
25 find the complete absence of the article, marked here as ø. There is some dis-
26 agreement in the literature on whether (some of ) the phonologically less sub-
27 stantial forms are to be seen as reductions of the full form the. Jones (2002:
28 342) summarises the majority view, which holds that the forms do lie on a
29 single continuum from full to zero. But Tagliamonte and Roeder (2009), for
30 example, suggest that the zero form is a reflex of the Old English situation,
31 prior to the spread of the definite article. By contrast, Rupp and Page-Verhoeff
32 (2005) and especially Rupp (2007) make a case for a distinction between the
33 full form on the one hand, and the reduced and zero forms on the other. This
34 suggestion is again made on historical grounds. The idea is that the full form
35 derived from the OE demonstrative masculine and feminine forms sē and sēo
36 (following the standard reconstruction of the rise of the English definite
37 article), with the reduced forms all going back to the neuter form þæt. The
38 neuter form would easily be reduced to [t] (cf. our example 15), and from there
39 to the other attested reduced forms. These alternative proposals would be more
40 convincing if they were supported by data showing that the variation obtaining
41 in the present day somehow still bears some reflection of the historical facts.
42 But in the absence of such data, we follow Jones’s (and others’) position, and
1 treat DAR as covering the whole spectrum of reduction, i.e. from full to partly
2 reduced to zero.
3 The literature on DAR has focused on three main issues, viz. its geographical
4 spread and variation (see e.g. Jones 1952; Barry 1972; Jones 1999, 2002, 2005;
5 Shorrocks 1991, 1992), its history (e.g. Rupp and Page-Verhoeff 2005 and
6 especially Rupp 2007), and the factors determining its occurrence in speech
7 production (e.g. Barry 1972; Jones 1999; Rupp and Page-Verhoeff 2005;
8 Tagliamonte and Roeder 2009). This case study aims to contribute to our
9 understanding of the latter, mainly by arguing that an important role is played
10 by token frequency (of different kinds of definite NP constructions) — a factor
11 completely ignored in previous scholarship.
12 Most work concerning the determinants of DAR has centred on the possibility
13 that it may be constrained by the phonological environment (Barry 1972; Jones
14 1999). More recently, however, some other linguistic factors have also been con-
15 sidered, i.e. the pragmatic aspects of the definite NP in question (information
16 status, roughly speaking old vs. new information, see Rupp and Page-Verhoeff
17 2005; or the possibility that in a repeated definite noun phrase the form of the
18 definite article may persist, Tagliamonte and Roeder 2009), the syntactic cate-
19 gory of the word preceding the article (Tagliamonte and Roeder 2009), and the
20 kind of noun heading the definite NP in question (Tagliamonte and Roeder
21 2009). Tagliamonte and Roeder (2009) have further made the interesting sugges-
22 tion that DAR, at least in York, may be socially constrained. Specifically, they
23 claim that DAR is especially frequent in the speech of young males, and offer
24 the suggestion that “the use of DAR in York (and perhaps in Yorkshire more
25 generally) has developed a new social value because it affirms a positive new
26 attitude toward local identity in the receptive climate of a developing prestige
27 for Northern English more generally” (Tagliamonte and Roeder 2009: 462).3
28 So although various determining factors have been investigated — linguistic
29 and non-linguistic ―, frequency has never been discussed. We will argue that
30 there is a connection between frequency and definite article reduction. To make
31 this link clear the discussion will be couched in explicit construction grammar
32 and usage-based model terms. Our starting point here will be the following
33 scale of DAR:
34
35
36 3. Tagliamonte and Roeder (2009) refer to work by Wales (2000) and Beal (2004) to support the
37 claim that the prestige of Northern Englishes is on the rise. Confusingly, Rupp (2007) reports
38 that according to the Tagliamonte and Roeder study (then still unpublished) “it is the females
rather than the males who appear to be implicated in the allocation of the social value of DAR”
39
(232). It is not clear what, since the publication of Rupp’s article, has brought about this
40
apparent reversal in (the interpretation of ?) the trend in Tagliamonte and Roeder’s data. We
41 return to Tagliamonte and Roeder’s suggestion concerning the social value of DAR in this
42 section, as well as in sections 4.3.4 and 5.
1 (17) full [ðə], [ði] > reduced [t], [θ], [ʔ] > zero

2
It is clear that not all reduced realizations are equally reduced: in particular,
3
fricatives are strictly speaking further down the scale than stops. However, we
4
do not wish to make any finer distinctions because (i) the status of the glottal
5
stop in this regard is very complex to analyse (see Jones 2007 for more details
6
on glottalised realisations of the definite article, and Docherty and Foulkes
7
1999 for more general discussion of the phonetics of glottaling), and (ii) the
8
numbers of the corpus examples we will be working with are not high enough
9
for it to make statistical sense to tease the categories apart. Sometimes we will
10
even have to collapse the reduced and zero categories.
11
Using this scale, we hypothesise that frequently occurring constructions will
12
feature more reduction than infrequent ones. Implicit in this hypothesis is the
13
notion that the basic unit of grammar is the construction ― the starting point of
14
construction grammar (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987; Goldberg 1995;
15
Croft 2001; Tomasello 2003).
16
17
4.2. Data and method
18
19 The data for this case study are drawn from a 325,000 word corpus of spoken
20 Lancashire, based on recordings held at the North West Sound Archive
21 ( NWSA). The corpus consists of interviewscarried out in the 1970s–1990s
22 (see further Hollmann and Siewierska 2006). The interviews selected for our
23 corpus were orthographically transcribed.
24 Because the NWSA was conceived as primarily serving local history pur-
25 poses, unfortunately very little information about the speakers’ background is
26 available. The main selection criterion for speakers in our corpus was that they
27 had never moved away from Lancashire. Some details about the speakers’ lives
28 and background are revealed during the interviews, but certain other factors
29 that are interesting from a sociolinguistic perspective, such as their participa-
30 tion in friendship networks (cf. Clark and Trousdale 2009), were impossible to
31 assess.
32 For the purpose of this case study two speakers (roughly 20,000 words) were
33 selected, based on their frequent use of reduced forms of the definite article.
34 The phonetic realisation of all tokens of the definite article (298 in total) in
35 their speech was analysed and transcribed by a postgraduate student at Lan-
36 caster University, a native speaker of a northern English variety, and subse-
37 quently checked by the authors as well as by a phonetician, also from the north
38 of the country.4 It would of course have been desirable to use a larger data set,
39
40
4. We are grateful to our student Claire Dembry and our colleague Kevin Watson for their help.
41 The latter also contributed to the conclusion reached in section 4.3.1, first reported on in
42 Hollmann and Watson (2007).
1 but other speakers in our corpus did not display enough DAR for analysis to be
2 possible.
3 Since our study is theoretically situated within the usage-based model, we
4 will analyse our speakers’ use of the definite article in a by-subjects manner.
5 On the usage-based view of language, each individual has a unique grammar,
6 based on their unique exposure to and use of language. A by-subjects analysis
7 allows the careful study of variables operating within the idiolect, which is
8 often missing in sociolinguistic/variationist work, including all studies on def-
9 inite article reduction cited in this study (for the importance of by-subjects
10 analysis see also Gries 2006; Hollmann and Siewierska 2006).
11 We identified all realisations of the definite article given in (5), i.e. [ðə], [ði],
12 [t], [θ], [ʔ] and zero. An acoustic analysis would doubtless have yielded more
13 fine-grained distinctions. However, given that the numbers we are working
14 with are fairly low, it is sufficient to be able to distinguish between full, re-
15 duced, and zero realisations.
16 The determinant factors included are phonological environment, informa-
17 tion structure, token frequency, and the social factor of identity. As observed in
18 section 2, some research in cognitive sociolinguistics uses multivariate anal
19 ysis. We feel that whilst this can be extremely useful in certain cases, much
20 depends on whether the variables in question can be seen to hang together in a
21 meaningful way, where ‘meaningful’ is understood in terms of the speakers’
22 grammar. Thus, for example, one of the main combinations of factors used by
23 Biber (1988) in his work on register variation makes up the ‘involved’ vs. ‘in-
24 formational’ nature of certain text types. This and his other dimensions are
25 clearly meaningful groupings of factors. And in Gries’s work on particle place-
26 ment, various factors (e.g. length, complexity, and concreteness/abstractness)
27 are meaningfully brought together under ‘ease of processing’. By contrast, it is
28 far from clear how the factors that we consider in this study could correlate in
29 a way that would be meaningful in terms of the speakers’ mental grammar.
30
31
4.3. Explanations
32
33 4.3.1. Phonology. The first determining factor to consider is phonology, i.e.
34 the environment in which the definite article occurs. Various previous studies
35 have investigated the possibility of assimilation to flanking segments. Using
36 data on northern dialects from the Survey of English Dialects basic (Orton and
37 Halliday 1961–1972) and incidental materials, Barry (1972) shows that the
38 definite article varies to some extent across the environments [ _#V] [ _#C]
39 [ _#t][ _#other]. However, geographical location appears to more important.
40 Jones (1999) is not only interested in variation across locations, but also in
41 different realisations within them. By showing that different realisations may
42 occur in the same phonological environment (in different locations) he con-
1 firms the conclusion from Barry’s work, that variation between full and various
2 kinds of reduced forms is not simply phonologically conditioned (see e.g.
3 Jones 1999: 103–104).
4 Our Lancashire corpus data appear to confirm the suggestion that variation
5 between full, reduced and zero definite articles is not phonologically condi-
6 tioned. In speaker 1 (ED), who displays the most variation between full, re-
7 duced, and zero forms, we find the following distribution across the environ-
8 ments [C#_#C] and [C#_#V]:5 the full article in 30% vs. 29% of the cases,
9 respectively, the reduced forms in 23% vs. 55% of the cases, and zero forms in
10 47% vs. 16%. We conclude that the degree of reduction (full, reduced, zero)
11 does not appear to be phonologically conditioned.
12
13 4.3.2. Information structure. The effect of information structure on DAR
14 has received some prior attention in Rupp and Page-Verhoeff (2005) and
15 Tagliamonte and Roeder (2009).
16 We discuss Tagliamonte and Roeder’s (2009) findings first because they
17 have very little connection with the way in which we approach information
18 structure in our data. Tagliamonte and Roeder (2009) focus on what they call
19 ‘discourse parallelism’: the influence of the realisation of the definite article of
20 a NP that is repeated within a short stretch of context. The authors unfortu-
21 nately do not define the exact size of the window they consider,6 but at any rate
22 they find that there is a strong effect:
23
24 Both DAR and zero variants are very highly favoured in the context of an immediately
25 preceding identical noun with the same form of the definite article, at .96 and .87 re-
26 spectively. Interestingly, when a preceding definite article has the other non-standard
27 form in the immediately preceding context, the current form is also favoured, but not as
28 much, .70 for DAR forms and .75 for zero. On the other hand, when a standard form of
29 the definite article occurs in the immediately preceding context, both non-standard vari-
30
ants are disfavoured. (Tagliamonte and Roeder 2009: 459)
31
32 Tagliamonte and Roeder do not try to explain why it is more likely for a glottal
33 variant to be followed by zero (an effect of .75) than the other way around
34 (.70). Indeed, this would not fit very well with their suggestion that zero does
35 not represent the final stage of reduction (see section 1). If, however, we
36
37
38 5. There were too few instances of other environments to analyse them, e.g. [V#_#V] occurs
only twice.
39
6. Nor do they refer to relevant previous scholarship. Going back at least as far as Levelt and
40
Kelter (1982) and Weiner and Labov (1983) the study of syntactic priming (a more common
41 term than ‘discourse parallelism’) has a long tradition. For a more recent, corpus based per-
42 spective, as well as an excellent overview of the literature, see Gries (2005).
1 assume that it is the endpoint on a gradual scale from full realisation to maxi-
2 mal reduction, then the pattern conforms to our expectation.
3 Rupp and Page-Verhoeff (2005) consider the degree of reduction in relation
4 to ‘givenness’, i.e. the assumed (by the speaker) degree of cognitive accessibil-
5 ity in the mind of the addressee of the referent of the noun in the definite NP in
6 question. In the literature on reduction, givenness in the above sense is studied
7 more commonly than Tagliamonte and Roeder’s parallelism (see e.g. Howes
8 1967; Lindblom 1983; Fowler and Housum 1987; Greenberg and Fossler-
9 Lussier 2000; Mitterer and Ernestus 2006). Rupp and Page-Verhoeff find that
10 reduction of the definite article is promoted by certain kinds of givenness, es-
11 pecially “situational reference” and “direct anaphoric reference”, and to a
12 lesser extent also “shared speaker-hearer knowledge”. Other kinds of informa-
13 tion status, e.g. “general knowledge” or “indirect anaphoric reference”,7 did
14 not display a positive correlation with DAR. Examples (18–22), taken from
15 Rupp and Page-Verhoeff’s article, illustrate these five respective types of given
16 information status. The emphases are in the original:
17
18
(18) It’s in t’ kitchen, did you not see it? My little Delft dish.
19
(19) They had a baby, and as soon as t’ baby arrived he got jealous.
20
(20) You’d be petrified. You’d have thought they were going to chop you up
21
and shove you in t’ lake. [discussing a frightening situation in a forest in
22
the neighbourhood]
23
(21) Travelling down t’ M6 to Manchester.
24
(22) I’ve been down south, been to London. I’ve been on t’ Underground.
25
Referring to Prince’s (1981) model of ‘givenness’, Rupp and Page-Verhoeff
26
suggest that situational reference and direct anaphoric reference constitute the
27
highest degree of givenness, followed by shared knowledge. It is therefore not
28
surprising that these three types of givenness are correlated with reduced real
29
isations of the article. These results seem to be nicely in line with the existing
30
literature on the correlation between givenness and reduction of the speech
31
signal. Rupp and Page-Verhoeff fail to make it clear, however, in what respect
32
shared knowledge represents a higher degree of givenness than for example
33
general knowledge. We are also less than fully convinced that the category of
34
general knowledge can be easily distinguished from that of shared speaker-
35
hearer knowledge. By way of illustration, we submit that not everyone in the
36
UK necessarily knows that the M6 is the motorway that connects Cumbria and
37
Lancashire to Manchester. In sum, since the categories that Rupp and Page-
38
39
40
7. The difference between direct and indirect anaphoric reference is that the former requires the
41 occurrence of the exact noun or some synonym thereof in the preceding discourse, whereas in
42 the case of the latter the referent is merely evoked by association.
1 Verhoeff make use of do not all seem entirely robust, we cannot but remain
2 sceptical in relation to their conclusions.
3 By contrast, the category of direct anaphoric reference is robust, and it is this
4 category that we will focus on. Within it, Rupp and Page-Verhoeff consider the
5 distance between the noun in the relevant NP and its previous mention. They
6 find that if the two mentions occur within a single clause, there is reduction in
7 40% of the cases, but this drops to 10% if the distance between the relevant
8 mentions is more than two intervening clauses. However, they also report that
9 this result is not statistically significant (at p < .05).
10 Like Rupp and Page-Verhoeff, we study our data in terms of the distance
11 between the noun in question and its previous mention (or that of a synonym),
12 i.e. in terms of what is commonly referred to as Referential Distance (RD,
13 Givón 1983). We could have refined our analysis by taking into account also
14 other aspects of givenness, such as Givón’s (1983) topic persistence and inter-
15 ference, or considering additional notions such episode boundaries (see e.g.
16 Marslen-Wilson et al. 1982) and prominence (e.g. Kuno 1976; Kuno and Ka-
17 buraki 1977). However, these additional layers of detail would make more
18 sense, statistically, in the context of a much larger corpus.
19 Unlike Rupp and Page-Verhoeff’s RD scale, ours does not range from a
20 single clause to two intervening clauses. Instead, we follow the practice estab-
21 lished by Givón (1983), and analyse anything occurring within a 20 clause
22 window of its previous mention as given, and anything occurring further away
23 than that as new.
24 Tables 1 and 2 reveal the distribution of full and reduced realisations of the
25 definite article according to information status. The reduced and zero catego-
26 ries have been collapsed for statistical reasons:
27
28 Table 1. F
ull and reduced realisations of the definite article according to information status in
29 speaker 1 ( ED)
30
Given referent New referent
31
32 Full definite article 3 (17%) 44 (44%)

Reduced definite article (incl. Ø) 15 (83%) 56 (56%)
33
Total 18 (100%) 100 (100%)
34
35
36 Table 2. F
ull and reduced realisations of the definite article according to information status in
37 speaker 2 ( TC)
38
Given referent New referent
39
40 Full definite article 46 (75%) 92 (77%)
Reduced definite article (incl. Ø) 15 (25%) 27 (23%)
41
Total 61 (100%) 119 (100%)
42
1 For speaker 1 the Fisher’s exact test (one-tailed) reveals that the difference is
2 statistically significant ( p = 0.024), but for speaker 2 it is not ( p = 0.456). In
3 other words, information status appears to be relevant for one speaker, but not
4 the other.8
5
6 4.3.3. Frequency. In order to investigate the role of frequency of strings
7 including the definite article we investigated the realisation of the article in the
8 context of a window of 2 positions to its left and right. The strength of the cor-
9 relation between the various reduced realisations of the definite article and its
10 collocates was calculated as t-scores ( p < .05, one-tailed; see e.g. Oakes 1998).
11 The t-scores were calculated by WordSmith 5.0; the minimum frequency for
12 each collocation was set at 5. Other measures of collocational strength are of
13 course available. Stefanowitsch and Gries’s (2003) collostructional method is
14 especially appealing (see also our comments in Hollmann and Siewierska
15 2007). However, in order for this method to work, one needs a clearly defined
16 construction, which we do not have. At first blush one might be inclined to
17 view DAR as a phenomenon that simply occurs in definite noun phrases. Yet
18 these NPs are part of a myriad of larger constructions, including prepositional
19 phrases. And as we will show in this section PPs appear to promote DAR. In
20 some other languages certain conjunctions may also host definite articles,
21 which are then typically reduced, see e.g. Kabak and Schiering (2006) on Ger-
22 man. We have not found such an effect in our Lancashire data using t-scores,
23 but we could not a priori exclude this possibility if we were to take a collo
24 structional approach. Thus, we would have to define a construction that gener-
25 alises over definite NPs and various other constructions in which these NPs
26 may be embedded, such as PPs and subordinate clauses. The only construction
27 that would do this is the sentence, which would render the collostructional
28 exercise pointless.
29 Tables 3–7, present the results of the analysis of our two speakers. All statis-
30 tically significant collocates are given, along with details as to their total fre-
31 quency within the specified window around the article, their frequency to its
32 left and right, its t-score, and finally the frequency of the relevant string in the
33
34 Table 3. Significant collocates of the reduced article in speaker 1 ( ED)
35
collocate total f left right t-score f BNC
36
37 In 5 5 0 2.10 35514
38
39
40
8. Note that if instead of a by-subjects analysis we had carried out a by-items analysis, as is more
41 usual in variationist work, then this observation concerning the variation in speaker 1’s idio-
42 lect would not have come to light.
1 Table 4. Significant collocates of the zero article in speaker 1 ( ED)

2
3
4 of 10 3 7 2.50 34877
5
smallholdings 6 0 6 2.35 3
( fell) 4 2 2 1.96 471
6
7
8 Table 5. Significant collocates of the full article in speaker 1 ( ED)
9
10
11 In 6 6 0 2.28 35514
12 on 6 6 0 2.19 20570
13
where 5 5 0 2.11 15915
14
15 Table 6. Significant collocates of the reduced article in speaker 2 ( TC)
16
17
18 In 13 12 1 3.45 35514
19 on 6 6 0 2.34 20570
20 down 5 5 0 2.16 1806
21
to 6 6 0 2.02 17478
22
23 Table 7. Significant collocates of the full article in speaker 2 ( TC)

24
25
26 and 19 19 0 3.09 261375
27 In 11 11 0 2.58 35514
28 of 7 7 0 2.21 34877
29
30
31 10.5 million word spoken part of the British National Corpus (BNC, see e.g.
32 Aston and Burnard 1998). The latter serves as an approximation of the amount
33 of exposure our speakers are likely to have had to the strings in question.9 For
34
35
9. Ideally of course we would have access to the actual frequencies of the strings in question in
36 the speakers’ personal linguistic histories (cf. Croft 2000), but this is impossible to obtain. We
37 considered using the frequencies from their interviews in the corpus, or the frequencies in the
38 Lancashire corpus as a whole. However, we dismissed this as the interviews are conversations
about speakers’ past, and thus presumably not very accurate representations of their ordinary
39
conversation. Specifically, words from certain domains are likely to be overrepresented, thus
40
distorting the frequencies. In support of this, consider that in the spoken part of the BNC war
41 occurs about 170 times per one million words, but more than 900 times per one million words
42 in our NWSA corpus. For school the figures are 430 (BNC) as against almost 2000 ( NWSA).
1 speaker 1 we distinguish between reduced and zero forms (Tables 3 and 4, re-
2 spectively), but given the low frequency of the zero realisation in speaker 2 (11
3 tokens) it made more statistical sense in the case of this speaker to collapse the
4 zero forms category with other reduced forms (Table 6). To throw the collo-
5 cates of the reduced/zero forms into relief, for both speakers the significant
6 collocates of the full definite article are also given (Tables 5 and 7, respectively).
7 With regard to the collocates of the reduced forms of the article, it would
8 seem, certainly at first sight, that the frequency of the constructions it appears
9 in does a rather good job of accounting for the data. Most of the collocates are
10 frequent prepositions: in, on, to, and of. Some examples of these prepositions
11 with reduced forms of the definite article are given:
12
(23) we had them big pipes in the/[ʔ]greenhouses (ED)
13
(24) theship’s husband’d come banging on the/[ʔ]door (TC)
14
(25) And you say to the/ø chief will you pack that? (TC)
15
(26) erm near the/[ʔ]bottom of the/ø smallholdings (ED)
16
17 However, some caution is in order in interpreting these results. This is be-
18 cause tables 5 and 7 reveal that the full definite article also collocates fre-
19 quently with prepositions ― or at least with some of them: in, on, and of. None-
20 theless, although it is clearly too simplistic to say that there is a neat split in the
21 distribution of definite article realisations in prepositional phrases such that
22 reduced/zero variants are attracted but full forms are repelled, the fact remains
23 that to and also down are not significant collocates of the full realisation. In
24 other words, there does appear to be a tendency for prepositional phrases to
25 attract reduced/zero articles.
26 The preposition down actually requires some more discussion. First, it does
27 not always take the definite NP complement on its own, as in example (27), but
28 twice forms a complex preposition with to, see example (28).
29
(27) So as I’m going down the/ø dock (TC)
30
(28) But you’d get your get up then get your bag and toddle off down to the/
31
[ʔ]dock. (TC)
32
33 Second, and more importantly for the frequency-based hypothesis, judging
34 from the BNC data the frequency of down appears to be of a smaller order of
35 magnitude than that of the other prepositional phrases. Moreover, a word like
36 old is just about as frequent as down, yet it co-occurs with the full definite
37 article, not a reduced form. We can explain this pattern with reference to the
38 notion of schematic constructions, specifically, the prepositional phrase con-
39 struction with a definite noun phrase complement. Our suggestion is that in
40 speakers’ linguistic knowledge generalisations over frequent tokens of prepo-
41 sitional phrases featuring reduced ( possibly zero) definite articles, as in (23–
42 26), may crystallise into a constructional schema [P reduced/ø Def Art N]. This
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Figure 1. L
icensing of [down (to)t’/ø Def Art N] by the constructional schema [P reduced/ø Def
10
Art N]
11
12
constructional schema then licenses reduced realisations of the definite article
13
in utterances such as (27–28). We visually represent our proposal as in Figure
14
1.10 The diagram follows Langacker’s (e.g. 1987) conventions of using right-
15
angled boxes for deeply entrenched constructions, rounded boxes for more
16
novel constructions, solid arrows for well established schema-instance rela-
17
tions, and dashed arrows for relatively novel relations. The constructional
18
schema [ . . . reduced/ø Def Art N] covers the possibility that there are other
19
prepositional phrase constructions stored with reduced definite articles, which
20
did not surface in our data (e.g. due to the size of our samples).
21
Tagliamonte and Roeder (2009: 457) observe that DAR is promoted in the
22
context of preceding prepositions in their York data as well, and they hint at
23
grammaticalisation as an explanation. Our construction grammar perspective
24
allows an explicit account of how the definite article in prepositional phrases
25
may be eroded through frequent usage. In this relation, we also point to the
26
widespread documentation of similar phenomena in other languages where the
27
hosting of definite articles by prepositions occurs across varieties, both re-
28
gional and standard. For examples we need not look further afield than German
29
and Italian, e.g. standard German im ‘in the:Dat.Sg.M’, < in dem, Middle
30
Frankish [ɪnd] ‘in the.Acc.Sg.F’ < in die (Kabak and Schiering 2006: 67), stan-
31
dard Italian della ‘of the.Sg.F’ < de ilia ( Napoli and Nevis 1987: 207).
32
33
34
10. This account raises some theoretical problems for the usage-based model. The productivity
35
of schemas is standardly seen as depending on the type frequency of the schema ― more
36 specifically, the frequency of low and medium-frequency types, with high-frequency types
37 seen as likely to be autonomous from the schema, see Bybee (1985: 129–134). Note, how-
38 ever, that Croft and Cruse are unconvinced by her evidence concerning the relation between
token frequency and autonomy (2004: Ch. 11). In different contexts, Hollmann (2003) and
39
Hollmann and Siewierska (2007) raised the question as to what exactly constitutes a high
40
enough token frequency for a schema to be productive, and what sort of token frequencies
41 would count as low, medium, and high. The usage-based model still has not provided em-
42 pirically supported answers.
1 In table 4 we have enclosed fell in brackets. This is because it is a significant

2 collocate only if its occurrence to the left and right of the definite article is
3 considered. It is clear that this is not the same construction, and so we need not
4 discuss it any further.
5 The one major surprise in our definite article reduction data concerns small-
6 holdings, a word describing a traditional type of small-scale farming. Despite
7 the fact that this word occurs only three times in the spoken part of the British
8 National Corpus, it shows up here as a collocate of the zero article. Smallhold-
9 ings also occurs twice with a full definite article, but only in questions from the
10 interviewer. In addition, it occurs once as a reduced but non-zero form in the
11 speech of the Lancashire speaker. This is important because it means we can
12 exclude the possibility that in her idiolect it has somehow taken on proper noun
13 status:
14
(29) Well (.) I used to go round the/[ʔ] smallholdings and they all knew me.
15
(ED)
16
17 One possible explanation to consider with regard to DAR preceding small-
18 holdings, is that smallholdings, although extremely rare in the spoken part of
19 BNC is very frequent in the speech of certain Lancashire speakers. In our en-
20 tire Lancashire corpus ED and the interviewer are actually the only speakers
21 who use the word. Note also that for example the noun back is more frequent
22 in our data (as it is in the BNC), yet it does not display a statistically significant
23 correlation with reduced/zero forms of the definite article. We would add to
24 this that if sheer frequency in a dialect or idiolect were to automatically lead to
25 reduction, we might expect the same in definite NPs with nautical terms (ship,
26 lifeboat, skipper) in our other speaker (TC), who uses them very frequently (8,
27 6, and 6 times, respectively) in describing his former job, yet here we consis-
28 tently find the full variant (yielding t-scores of 2.67 and 2.35 for the colloca-
29 tion with the full definite article, which indicate a statistically significant
30 correlation).
31 Another possible explanation might be that smallholdings is preceded by
32 reduced (including zero) realisations of the where it functions as given infor-
33 mation. Operationalising Givón’s (1983) notion of Referential Distance as ex-
34 plained in section 4.3.2, however, we find that while the 1 token of smallhold-
35 ings as a given referent features DAR, so do all the cases of smallholdings
36 when it is a new referent.
37 In view of the inadequacy of the linguistic explanations explored here, we
38 propose that the explanation may be a sociolinguistic one.
39
40 4.3.4. Social factors. Before we offer the possibility that the high degree of
41 reduction of the definite article in combination with smallholdings may have a
42 sociolinguistic explanation, we note that in the speech of ED, this collocation
1 may not be an isolated case. The word farm displays a relatively high t-score
2 as well. At 1.20, it is admittedly too low to count as statistically significant at
3 the p < .05 level, but p is nonetheless almost .2, which at least suggests that a
4 larger corpus might show a significant pattern.
5 What we have then is two words which are associated with DAR: a hypo-
6 nym and a superordinate in the semantic field of farming. Historically, farm-
7 ing, especially dairy farming, has been a central aspect of life in the region.
8 This continues to be the case even today: one indication of this is that accord-
9 ing to a 2008 survey by the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural
10 Affairs, the North West region (of which Lancashire is part) displayed the sec-
11 ond highest milk production — second only to the South West.11 To put this into
12 perspective, consider that the South West is almost 70% larger, and is far less
13 densely populated (475 vs. 215/ km2; mainly because of the urbanised Greater
14 Manchester and Liverpool areas in the North West, the largest city in the South
15 West being Bristol).12
16 Our sociolinguistic explanation is based on the observation that definite
17 article reduction has been described as “[t]he most stereotypical feature of
18 northern British English dialects, especially those of Yorkshire and Lancashire”
19 (Jones 2002: 325). In Beal’s (2000: 349) terms we might thus say that it has
20 acquired a local significance and resonance. Describing the phonological vari-
21 able (a:) in the accent of Cardiff, Coupland draws attention to the salience of
22 local pronunciations in “a number of lexical forms which relate to focal ele-
23 ments of Cardiff local culture” (1988: 27). One example Coupland gives is the
24 word Cardiff itself, and he goes on:
25
26 The contemporary Cardiff folk-hero, singer and broadcaster Frank Hennessey, has as
27 one of his catchwords remarkable ([ri’mæ̃kǝ:kbl̩ ]), and, as his radio programme jingle,
28 a sung fanfare dominated by the vowel-quality [æ:] in Hark hark the lark in Cardiff
29
Arm’s Park. At one level, these lexical forms are a vehicle for the phonological variable,
but their availability in turn reinforces and compounds the social significance of the
30
variable itself. In this instance, regional pronunciation and local experience have a mu-
31
tually encouraging, we might say symbiotic, relationship. (1988: 27)
32
33
Parallel to Coupland’s claim regarding Cardiff (a:), our suggestion is that in
34
Lancashire DAR may also be used to mark local identity in collocations with
35
words representing focal elements of Lancashire culture, such as farming. It
36
would have been helpful in this relation if more background information about
37
38
39
11. Survey available at [https://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/statnot/regacc.pdf, accessed 26 Janu-
40
ary 2010].
41 12. See the (2007) figures from the Office of National Statistics, available at [http://www.
42 statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D9664.xls, accessed 26 January 2010].
1 the speakers in our corpus had been available, but as explained in section 4.2,
2 the NWSA is largely lacking in this respect. The speaker in question does how-
3 ever say about her father that “he were a poultry farmer”. Her own professional
4 life was connected to this industry as well: working for a co-operative she “had
5 to clean ‘em you had to wash them eggs”.
6 Interestingly, Tagliamonte ( pers. comm. October 2008) reports that in her
7 York data the word Minster, referring to York Minster, the city’s main land-
8 mark, is also very often preceded by reduced forms of the definite article. (We
9 do not know whether in this observation the role of frequency and information
10 status have been factored out.)
11 Our proposal has the interesting implication for construction grammar that
12 constructions, standardly defined as pairings of form and meaning, may also
13 include social meaning. In this case, we propose that the definite noun phrase
14 construction featuring DAR may be stored by (some) Lancashire speakers as
15 indicating an orientation towards local Lancashire identity. The inclusion of
16 social meaning alongside semantic and pragmatic facts as part of speakers’
17 linguistic knowledge is fairly well accepted in sociolinguistics (e.g. Ochs
18 1992; Bender 2000; Eckert 2000). Since social value is an aspect of language
19 use that may well be noticed and stored by speakers alongside more tradition-
20 ally recognised aspects of meaning, this scenario is also highly compatible
21 with the usage-based model (e.g. Bybee 1985; Langacker 1987, 1991, 2000;
22 Croft 2000; Croft and Cruse 2004). However, it is rarely commented on in the
23 cognitive linguistic literature, Hudson’s work (e.g. 1996, 2007a, 2007b) being
24 a rare exception.
25 Because a correlation — in this case, between a locally significant social-
26 cultural phenomenon (farming) and a locally significant linguistic feature
27 (DAR) — is not the same as a causal relation, our suggestion must remain at
28 this stage a very tentative one. In a groundbreaking study on (aw) in Pittsburgh,
29 where this diphthong has a tendency to be monophthongised, Johnstone and
30 Kiesling (2008) find that local speakers for whom the monophthongised vari-
31 ant indexes local identity are in fact unlikely to use this variant themselves.
32 They conclude that this invalidates their own hypothesis, advanced in previous
33 work (Johnstone et al. 2002; Kiesling and Wisnosky 2003), that the local vari-
34 ant is used as a marker of localness. But the importance of their study is con-
35 siderably more far-reaching: in the face of the social stratification of some
36 linguistic variable, sociolinguists have often rushed to the conclusion that the
37 local variant indexes identity. As a case in point, Johnstone and Kiesling (2008:
38 11) cite Fridland et al., who propose that “it seems reasonable that groups of
39 speakers who use the same phonetic variant(s) and share some recognizable
40 social characteristic are using that variant as a marker of that membership”
41 (2004: 4). Mindful of Johnstone and Kiesling’s conclusion, our hypothesis
42 concerning the possible status of DAR as a marker of local identity would ide-
1 ally be supported by evidence from an experiment probing into Lancashire

2 speakers’ perception of the social value of this non-standard feature (for an
3 example of such an experiment in the context of Pittburghese, see Johnstone
4 and Kiesling 2008).
5 As observed in section 4.1, Tagliamonte and Roeder (2009) also discuss
6 DAR in terms of identity marking. In line with the lesson taught by Johnstone
7 and Kiesling (2008) they are actually careful to point out in their conclusion
8 that a causal relation between this kind of indexicality and DAR “requires
9 deeper ethnographic scrutiny in York” (Tagliamonte and Roeder 2009: 462).
10 However, it is interesting to see how their conclusions are represented in other
11 sociolinguistic work. Rupp reports that according to Tagliamonte and Roeder’s
12 study “younger generations in the city of York (. . .) show a tendency to use
13 DAR as a social marker” (2007: 218).13 Rácz (2010) states that Tagliamonte
14 and Roeder “reach the conclusion that it plays an important role in establishing
15 identity in the city of York” (7–8). We side with Kiesling and Johnstone (2008)
16 in observing a tendency to interpret patterns of variation in relation to identity
17 a bit too readily.
18 To the extent that social factors may play a role in DAR (whether in Lan-
19 cashire or in York), there is a lesson for proponents of the usage-based model
20 as well. The causal relation between token frequency on the one hand, and re-
21 duction on the other, has been supported with solid empirical evidence (see
22 section 4.1 for some references). However, the correlation has often been
23 studied in the context of (relatively) standard data. Berkenfield (2001), for in-
24 stance, draws her data from conversations in a news show — a relatively formal
25 setting. In some usage-based work we do not actually find out how standard (or
26 otherwise) the speech of the participants is. Bybee and Scheibman, for in-
27 stance, describe their corpus as follows:
28
29 The conversations took place on three separate occasions and represent the speech of
30 six participants, four females and two males, all residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
31 The usages were transcribed using a conventional tape recorder and earphones . . .
32 (1999: 579)
33
34 The degree of standardness, it would appear, is not felt to be an issue. But if our
35 and Tagliamonte and Roeder’s suggestions regarding DAR are correct, they
36 imply that in non-standard varieties social factors may disturb the otherwise
37 solid correlation between high token frequency and reduction: relatively
38
39
40
13. The author may have not had access to the final version of Tagliamonte and Roeder’s article
41 (cf. also our footnote 3), but did have the benefit of personal comments from Tagliamonte
42 (see Rupp 2007: 215, footnote 1).
1 infrequent constructions may be subject to high degrees of reduction if the re-

2 duced variants mark speaker identity.
3
4
5. Conclusions concerning DAR and cognitive sociolinguistics in
5
general
6
7 The present case study on DAR in Lancashire dialect has shown that this lin-
8 guistic variable is constrained by information structure, frequency, the avail-
9 ability of a schema, and perhaps a social factor, i.e. the marking of local identity.
10 Thus, with regard to our understanding of the phenomenon of DAR in Lan-
11 cashire and presumably elsewhere, we conclude that it has been a mistake in
12 previous (mainly variationist) scholarship to ignore frequency and schemas
13 (whose importance is held to be crucial in usage-based and most construction-
14 based approaches to language). In this respect our study echoes Hollmann and
15 Siewierska (2007) and Clark and Trousdale (2009), where one or both of these
16 factors were also shown to play a role in the explanation of variation in non-
17 standard data.
18 In addition to invoking frequency and schema, our explanation of the Lan-
19 cashire facts has also benefitted from an interface with sociolinguistics, whence
20 we have drawn the notion of linguistic variants acting as identity markers (cf.
21 e.g. Labov 1963, 1972; Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). We have also in-
22 corporated recent work by Johnstone and Kiesling (2008) which suggests that
23 such connections should not be made too hastily. Mindful of their suggestions,
24 the small size of our data set and the limited amount of social information
25 available for our speakers, we certainly do not wish to arrive at unwarranted
26 conclusions. Yet this case study is nonetheless an interesting demonstration of
27 how the meaning dimension of constructions, traditionally only described in
28 terms of semantic(-pragmatic) import (e.g. Langacker 1987) may include so-
29 cial meaning (in the sense of Bender 2000) as well (see also Hudson 1996,
30 2007a, 2007b).
31 From the point of view of the interface between sociolinguistics and the
32 usage-based model, our study interestingly indicates that the correlation be-
33 tween token frequency and reduction may be less straightforward than has
34 traditionally been assumed. That is, mirroring the result of Tagliamonte and
35 Roeder’s (2009) York study, ourdata suggest that the use of reduced variants
36 may constitute “acts of identity”, to borrow Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s
37 (1985) term. In other words, the normal causal relation between token fre-
38 quency and morphophonological reduction appears to hold only for the left-
39 hand side of Labov’s (1972, 1994, 2001) well-known stereotypicality hierar-
40 chy, given in (30). As a particular reduced variant takes on an indexical role in
41 a speech community, speakers may start to use it more often than they would
42 otherwise do (or conversely, they might avoid it).
1 (30) indicator < marker < stereotype
2
3 Exactly what degree of stereotyping (indicator, marker, or stereotype) will lead
4 to this shift in usage is a question that must remain for future research. At any
5 rate, comprehensive analyses of reduction from a usage-based perspective
6 must take into account the possibility that certain reduced variants index social
7 identities, and that this may have an impact on the facts of reduction in a given
8 variety, in addition to more traditionally recognised linguistic factors such as
9 frequency or information status.
10 This refinement of the usage-based approach to reduction hints at the pos-
11 sibility that further benefits to the model may well be gained from consider-
12 ation of non-standard data and analysis of the social-cultural fabric of the com-
13 munities from which these data are obtained. In this respect, the Lancashire
14 case study adds to the rapidly expanding body of evidence in favour of cogni-
15 tive sociolinguistics; see sections 2 and 3 and the contributions in Kristiansen
16 and Dirven (2008) and Geeraerts et al. (2010).
17 It is interesting to note that the relation between cognitive linguistics and
18 sociolinguistics, thus far, is essentially — to use a biological metaphor —
19 commensal: cognitive linguists benefitting from insights gained in the lan-
20 guage variation and change tradition. Consider in this relation the contrast be-
21 tween the sub-title of Labov’s (to appear) monograph, Principles of linguistic
22 change. Volume 3: Cognitive and cultural factors, and its contents, which dis-
23 play a complete lack of discussion of the advances in cognitive sociolinguistics
24 summarised and referred to here. To continue the metaphor, this newly emerg-
25 ing field will no doubt expand and develop even faster once sociolinguists ac-
26 knowledge the considerable potential for symbiosis as well.
27
28 Received 12 February 2010 Lancaster University

29 Revision received 1 August 2010
30
31
32
References
33
Aston, Guy & Lou Burnard. 1998. The BNC handbook: Exploring the British National Corpus
34
with SARA. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
35
Barry, M. V. 1972. The morphemic distribution of the definite article in contemporary regional
36 English. In M. F. Wakelin (ed.), Patterns in the folk speech of the British Isles, 164 –181. Lon-
37 don: The Athlone Press.
38 Beal, Joan C. 2000. From Geordie Ridley to Viz: Popular literature in Tyneside English. Language
and Literature 9(4). 343–359.
39
Beal, Joan C. 2004. Geordie nation: language and identity in the north-east of England. Lore and
40
Language 17. 33– 48.
41 Bender, Emily. 2000. Syntactic variation and linguistic competence: The case of AAVE copula
42 absence. Stanford: Stanford University PhD dissertation.
1 Berkenfield, Catie. 2001. The role of frequency in the realization of English that. In Joan L. Bybee
2
& Paul J. Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (Typological
Studies in Language 45), 281–308. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
3
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-
4 sity Press.
5 Blevins, Juliette. 2006. New perspectives on English sound patterns: “Natural” and “unnatural” in
6 evolutionary phonology. Journal of English Linguistics 34(1). 6 –25.
7
Blevins, Juliette. 2008. Natural and unnatural sound patterns: A pocket field guide. In Klaas Wil-
lems & Ludovic De Cuypere (eds.), Naturalness and iconicity in language (Iconicity in Lan-
8
guage and Literature 7), 121–148. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
9 Brönte, Emily. 1847. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics Edition, 1994.
10 Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
11 Bybee, Joan L. & Joanne Scheibman. 1999. The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: The
12
reduction of don’t in English. Linguistics 37(4). 575–596.
Chappell, Hillary & William McGregor (eds.). 1996. The grammar of inalienability. Berlin & New
13
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
14 Cheshire, Jenny & Sue Fox. 2009. Was/were variation: A perspective from London. Language
15 Variation and Change 21(1). 1–23.
16 Clark, Lynn & Graeme Trousdale. 2009. The role of frequency in phonological change: Evidence
17
from TH-fronting in east-central Scotland. English Language and Linguistics 13(1). 33–55.
Coupland, Nikolas. 1988. Dialect in use: Sociolinguistic variation in Cardiff English. Cardiff:
18
University of Wales Press.
19 Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman.
20 Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective.
21 Oxford: Oxford University Press.
22
Croft, William. 2009. Toward a social cognitive linguistics. In Vyvyan Evans & Stéphanie Pourcel
(eds.), New directions in cognitive linguistics (Human Cognitive Processing 24), 395– 420. Am-
23
sterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
24 Croft, William. 2010. The origins of grammaticalization in the verbalization of experience. Lin-
25 guistics 48: 1– 48.
26 Croft, William & D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive linguistics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguis-
27
tics). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Docherty, Gerard & Paul Foulkes. 1999. Newcastle and Derby: Instrumental phonetics and varia-
28
tionist studies. In Gerard Docherty & Paul Foulkes (eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the
29 British Isles, 47–71. London: Arnold.
30 Dubois, Sylvie & Barbara M. Horvath. 2004. Cajun vernacular English: phonology. In Edgar W.
31 Schneider, Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Raj Mesthrie & Clive Upton (eds.), A handbook of
32
varieties of English: Vol. 1. Phonology, 407– 416. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic variation as social practice (Language in Society). Oxford:
33
Blackwell.
34 Fidelholtz, James L. 1975. Word frequency and vowel reduction in English. CLS 11. 200 –214.
35 Fowler , C. & J. Housum. 1987. Talkers’ signalling of ‘new’ and ‘old’ words in speech and
36 listeners’ perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language 26. 489–
37
504.
Fridland, Valerie, Kathryn Bartlett & Roger Kreuz. 2004. Do you hear what I hear? Experimental
38
measurement of the perceptual salience of acoustically manipulated vowel variants by Southern
39 speakers in Memphis, TN. Language Variation and Change 16(1). 1–16.
40 Geeraerts, Dirk, Stefan Gondelaers, and Peter Bakema. 1994. The structure of lexical variation:
41 Meaning, naming and context (Cognitive Linguistics Research 5). Berlin & New York: Mouton
42
de Gruyter.
1 Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen & Yves Peirsman (eds.). 2010. Advances in cognitive sociolin-
2
guistics (Cognitive Linguistics Research 45). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Givón, Talmy. 1983. Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In Talmy Givón (ed.), Topic
3
continuity in discourse: a quantitative cross-language study, 1– 42. Amsterdam & Philadelphia:
4 John Benjamins.
5 Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument struc-
6 ture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
7
Greenberg, Steven & Eric Fossler-Lussier. 2000. The uninvited guest: Information’s role in guid-
ing the production of spontaneous speech. Proceedings of the CREST workshop on models of
8
speech production: motor planning and articulatory modeling. Kloster Seeon, Germany, May
9 1– 4, 2000.
10 Gries, Stefan Th. 1999. Particle movement: A cognitive and functional approach. Cognitive Lin-
11 guistics 10(2). 105–145.
12
Gries, Stefan Th. 2001. A multifactorial analysis of syntactic variation: Particle movement revis-
ited. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 8(1). 33–50.
13
Gries, Stefan Th. 2002. The influence of processing on grammatical variation: Particle placement
14 in English. In Nicole Dehé, Ray Jackendoff, Andrew McIntyre & Silke Urban (eds.), Verb-
15 particle explorations (Interface Explorations 1), 269–288. Berlin & New York: Mouton de
16 Gruyter.
17
Gries, Stefan Th. 2003. Multifactorial analysis in corpus linguistics: A study of particle placement.
London: Continuum.
18
Gries, Stefan Th. 2005. Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic
19 Research 34(4). 365–399.
20 Gries, Stefan Th. 2006. Some proposals towards more rigorous corpus linguistics. Zeitschrift für
21 Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54(2). 191–202.
22
Grondelaers, Stefan. 2000. De distributie van niet anaforisch er buiten de eerste zinplaats: socio-
lexicologische, functionele en psycholinguïstische aspected van er’s status als presentatief sig-
23
naal. Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven PhD dissertation.
24 Grondelaers, Stefan & Marc Brysbaert. 1996. De distributie van het presentatieve er buiten de
25 eerste zinsplaats. Nederlandse Taalkunde 1. 280 –305.
26 Grondelaers, Stefan, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts. 2006. A case for a cognitive corpus linguis-
27
tics. In Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson & Michael J. Spivey
(eds.), Methods in cognitive linguistics (Human Cognitive Processing 18), 149–169. Amsterdam
28
& Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
29 Grondelaers, Stefan, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts. 2008. National variation in the use of er
30 “there”. Regional and diachronic constraints on cognitive explanations. In Gitte Kristiansen &
31 René Dirven (eds.), Cognitive sociolinguistics: Language variation, cultural models, social sys-
32
tems (Cognitive Linguistics Research 39). 153–203. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Haeseryn, Walter, Kirsten Romijn, Guido Geerts, Jaap de Rooij & Maarten C. van der Toorn. 1997.
33
Algemene Nederlandse spraakkunst. 2nd edition. Groningen / Deurne: Martinus Nijhoff
34 Uitgevers / Wolters Plantyn.
35 Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. Explaining alienability contrasts in adnominal possession: economy
36 vs. iconicity. Paper presented at the 2nd Conference on the Syntax of the World’s Languages,
37
Lancaster University. [Handout available http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/2006swl.pdf, ac-
cessed 12 March 2010].
38
Hollmann, Willem B. 2003. Synchrony and diachrony of English periphrastic causatives: A cogni-
39 tive perspective. Manchester: University of Manchester PhD dissertation.
40 Hollmann, Willem B. To appear. Constructions in cognitive sociolinguistics. In Graeme Trousdale
41 & Thomas Hoffmann (eds.), Oxford handbook of construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
42
versity Press.
1 Hollmann, Willem B. & Anna Siewierska. 2006. Corpora and (the need for) other methods
2
in a study of Lancashire dialect. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54(2). 203–
216.
3
Hollmann, Willem B. & Anna Siewierska. 2007. A construction grammar account of possessive
4 constructions in Lancashire dialect: Some advantages and challenges. English Language and
5 Linguistics 11(2). 407– 424.
6 Hollmann, Willem B. & Kevin Watson. 2007. Definite article reduction in Northern England: on
7
frequency, constructions, and sociolinguistics. Paper presented at the University of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium on Formulaic Language, University of Wisconsin.
8
Hooper, Joan B. 1976. Word frequency in lexical diffusion and the source of morphophonological
9 change. In W. Christie (ed.), Current progress in historical linguistics, 96 –105. Amsterdam:
10 North Holland.
11 Howes, D. 1967. Equilibrium theory of word frequency distributions. Psychonometrics Bulletin 1,
12
18.
Hudson, Richard. 1996. Sociolinguistics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, 2nd edition). Cam-
13
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
14 Hudson, Richard. 2007a. Inherent variability and modularity: A comment on Adger’s ‘Combinato-
15 rial variability’. Journal of Linguistics 43(3). 683– 694.
16 Hudson, Richard. 2007b. Language networks: The new Word Grammar. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
17
sity Press.
Johnstone, Barbara, Neeta Bhasin & Denise Wittkofski. 2002. ‘Dahntahn Pittsburgh’: monoph-
18
thongal /aw/ and representations of localness in Southwestern Pennsylvania. American Speech
19 77. 148–166.
20 Johnstone, Barbara & Scott E. Kiesling. 2008. Indexicality and experience: Exploring the mean-
21 ings of /aw/-monophthongization in Pittsburgh. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(1). 5–33.
22
Jones, Mark. 1999. The phonology of definite article reduction. In Clive Upton & Katie Wales
(eds.), Dialectal variation in English (Proceedings of the Harold Orton Centenary Conference
23
1998). Leeds Studies in English 30. 103–121.
24 Jones, Mark. 2002. The origin of definite article reduction in northern English dialects: evidence
25 from dialect allomorphy. English Language and Linguistics 6(2). 325–345.
26 Jones, Mark. 2005. The phonetics and phonology of definite article reduction in northern English
27
dialects. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge PhD dissertation.
Jones, Mark. 2007. Glottals and grammar: Definite article reduction and morpheme boundaries.
28
Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics 12. 61–77.
29 Jones, William E. 1952. The definite article in living Yorkshire dialect. Leeds Studies in English
30 7–8. 81–91.
31 Kabak, Bariş & René Schiering. 2006. The phonology and morphology of function word contrac-
32
tions in German. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 9(1). 53–99.
Kiesling, Scott F. & Marc Wisnosky. 2003. Competing norms, heritage prestige, and /aw/-
33
monophthongization in Pittsburgh. Poster presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation
34 ( NWAV) 32, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
35 Kristiansen, Gitte. 2003. How to do things with allophones: linguistic stereotypes as cognitive
36 reference points in social cognition. In René Dirven, Roslyn M. Frank & Martin Putz (eds.),
37
Cognitive models in language and thought: Ideology, metaphors and meanings (Cognitive Lin-
guistics Research 24), 69–120. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
38
Kristiansen, Gitte. 2006. Towards a usage-based cognitive phonology. International Journal of
39 English Studies 6(2). 107–140.
40 Kristiansen, Gitte & René Dirven (eds.). 2008 Cognitive sociolinguistics: Language variation,
41 cultural models, social systems (Cognitive Linguistics Research 39). Berlin & New York: Mou-
42
ton de Gruyter.
1 Kuno, Sususmo. 1976. Subject, theme, and speaker’s empathy: A reexamination of relativiza-
2
tion phenomena. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and topic, 417– 444. New York: Academic
Press.
3
Kuno, Sususmo. & Etsuko Kaburaki. 1977. Empathy and syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 84(4).
4 627– 672.
5 Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19. 237–309.
6 Labov, William. 1972. Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Phila-
7
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors (Language in
8
Society). Oxford: Blackwell.
9 Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2: Social factors (Language in So-
10 ciety). Oxford: Blackwell.
11 Labov, William. 2006. A sociolinguistic perspective on sociophonetic research. Journal of
12
Phonetics 34(4). 500 –515.
Labov, William. (to appear). Principles of linguistic change. Volume 3: Cognitive and cultural
13
factors (Language in Society). Oxford: Blackwell.
14 Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind.
15 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
16 Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical prerequisites.
17
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. II: Descriptiveapplication.
18
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
19 Langacker, Ronald W. 1999. Grammar and conceptualization (Cognitive Linguistics Research
20 14). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
21 Langacker, Ronald W. 2000. A dynamic usage-based model. In Michael Barlow & Suzanne Kem-
22
mer (eds.), Usage-based models of language, 1– 63. Stanford: CSLI.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
23
Press.
24 Le Page, Robert B. & Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to
25 language and ethnicity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
26 Levelt, Willem J. M. & Stephanie Kelter. 1982. Surface form and memory in question answering.
27
Cognitive Psychology 14(1).78–106.
Lindblom, Björn. 1983. Economy of speech gestures. In P. F. MacNeilage (ed.), The production of
28
speech, 217–245. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
29 Marslen-Wilson, William, W. Levy & Lorraine K. Tyler. 1982. Producing interpretable discourse:
30 The establishment and maintenance of reference. In Robert J. Jarvella & Wolfgang Klein (eds.),
31 Speech, place, and action, 339–378. Chichester: Wiley.
32
Mitterer, Holger & Mirjam Ernestus. 2006. Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence
from /t/-lenition in Dutch. Journal of Phonetics 34(1). 73–103.
33
Napoli, Donna Jo & Joel Nevis. 1987. Inflected prepositions in Italian. Phonology Yearbook 4.
34 195–209.
35 Oakes, Michael P. Statistics for corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
36 Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking
37
context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 335–358. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
38
Ohala, John J. 1974. Phonetic explanation in phonology. In Anthony Bruck, Robert A. Fox &
39 Michael W. La Galy (eds.), Papers from the parasession on Natural Phonology, 251–274. Chi-
40 cago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
41 Orton, Harold & Wilfrid J. Halliday. 1962–1971. The Survey of English Dialects: The basic mate-
42
rial. Leeds: E. J. Arnold.
1 Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical
2
pragmatics, 223–255. New York: Academic Press.
Rácz, Péter. 2010. A usage-based approach to salience: Definite article reduction in Northern Eng-
3
land. Ms, University of Freiburg.
4 Rupp, Laura. 2007. The (socio-)linguistic cycle of definite article reduction. Folia Linguistica
5 Historica 28. 215–250.
6 Rupp, Laura & Hanne Page-Verhoeff. 2005. Pragmatic and historical aspects of definite article
7
reduction in northern English dialects. English World-Wide 26(3). 325–346.
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1885. Über die Lautgesetze: Gegen die Junggrammatiker. Berlin: R.
8
Oppenheim.
9 Shorrocks, Graham. 1991. The phonetic form of the definite article and some other linguistic fea-
10 tures in parts of Lancashire and Greater Manchester County: A reply to John Kerins. Lore and
11 Language 10. 3–9.
12
Shorrocks, Graham. 1992. The definite article in the dialect of Farnworth and district, Greater
Manchester County, formerly Lancashire. Orbis 34. 173–186.
13
Siewierska, Anna & Willem B. Hollmann. 2007. Ditransitive clauses in English with special refer-
14 ence to Lancashire dialect. In Mike Hannay & Gerard J. Steen (eds.), Structural-Functional
15 studies in English grammar: In honour of Lachlan Mackenzie (Studies in Language Companion
16 Series 83), 83–102. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
17
Sinha, Chris. 1999. Grounding, mapping, and acts of meaning. In Theo Janssen & Gisela Redeker
(eds.), Cognitive linguistics: foundations, scope and methodology (Cognitive Linguistics Re-
18
search 15), 223–255. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
19 Sinha, Chris. 2004. The evolution of language: from signals to symbols to system. In D. Kim-
20 brough Oller and Ulrike Griebel (eds.), Evolution of communication systems: A comparative
21 approach, 217–235. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
22
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of
words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2). 209– 43.
23
Tagliamonte, Sali A., Shana Poplack & Ejike Eze. 1997. Pluralization patterns in Nigerian Pidgin
24 English. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 12(1). 103–129.
25 Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Rebecca V. Roeder. 2009. Variation in the English definite article: Socio-
26 historical linguistics in t’speech community. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(4). 435– 471.
27
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisi-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
28
Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Constructions of intersubjectivity: Discourse, syntax and cognition. Oxford:
29 Oxford University Press.
30 Wales, Katie. 2000. North and south: An English linguistic divide. English Today 16. 4 –15.
31 Weiner, E. Judith & William Labov. 1983. Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Lin-
32
guistics 19(1). 29–58.
Wright, Joseph. 1905. The English dialect grammar: Comprising the dialects of England, of the
33
Shetland and Orkney Islands. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
34 Zipf, George K. 1935. The psycho-biology of language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
(InDesign) WDG (155×230mm) TimesNewRoman J-2382 COGL 22:1 (IDP) PMU: A1 19/11/2010 HC1: WSL 30/11/2010 pp. 54–54 (p. 54) 2382_22-1_02

Hollmann and Siewierska 2011 DAR Lancs

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hollmann and Siewierska 2011 DAR Lancs

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

1 The status of frequency, schemas,

Cognitive Linguistics 22–1 (2011), 25–54 0936–5907/11/0022–0025

23 2.1. Gries (2001, 2002, 2003)

28 (1) Fred picked up the book.

1 (7) In ons land is er nog altijd geen openbaar golfterrein.

1 Scheibman 1999; Berkenfield 2001). By contrast, it is often ignored by

10 3.1. Hollmann and Siewierska (2007)

9 For some current examples, this time from Lancashire, consider:

1 (17) full [ðə], [ði] > reduced [t], [θ], [ʔ] > zero

32 Full definite article 3 (17%) 44 (44%)

1 Table 4. Significant collocates of the zero article in speaker 1 ( ED)

23 Table 7. Significant collocates of the full article in speaker 2 ( TC)

1 In table 4 we have enclosed fell in brackets. This is because it is a significant

1 ally be supported by evidence from an experiment probing into Lancashire

1 infrequent constructions may be subject to high degrees of reduction if the re-

28 Received 12 February 2010 Lancaster University

You might also like

Hollmann and Siewierska 2011 DAR Lancs

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hollmann and Siewierska 2011 DAR Lancs

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

1 The status of frequency, schemas,

Cognitive Linguistics 22–1 (2011), 25–54 0936–5907/11/0022–0025

23 2.1. Gries (2001, 2002, 2003)

28 (1) Fred picked up the book.

1 (7) In ons land is er nog altijd geen openbaar golfterrein.

1 Scheibman 1999; Berkenfield 2001). By contrast, it is often ignored by

10 3.1. Hollmann and Siewierska (2007)

9 For some current examples, this time from Lancashire, consider:

1 (17) full [ðə], [ði] > reduced [t], [θ], [ʔ] > zero

32 Full definite article 3 (17%) 44 (44%)

1 Table 4. Significant collocates of the zero article in speaker 1 ( ED)

23 Table 7. Significant collocates of the full article in speaker 2 ( TC)

1 In table 4 we have enclosed fell in brackets. This is because it is a significant

1 ally be supported by evidence from an experiment probing into Lancashire

1 i­nfrequent constructions may be subject to high degrees of reduction if the re-

28 Received 12 February 2010 Lancaster University

You might also like

1 infrequent constructions may be subject to high degrees of reduction if the re-

28 Received 12 February 2010 Lancaster University