Lexical Specificity and Allostructional VariationSubject Pronoun Omission in World Englishes

  1. Iván Tamaredo Meira 1
  1. 1 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Complutense de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR 02p0gd045

Libro:
Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain
  1. Francisco Gallardo-del-Puerto (coord.)
  2. Mª del Carmen Camus-Camus (coord.)
  3. Jesús Ángel González-López (coord.)

Editorial: Editorial de la Universidad de Cantabria ; Universidad de Cantabria

ISBN: 978-84-19024-15-2

Año de publicación: 2022

Páginas: 118-124

Congreso: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. Congreso (44. 2021. Santander)

Tipo: Aportación congreso

Resumen

The aim of the present paper is to measure the degree of lexical specificity of the omitted subject pronoun construction and its competing variant, the overt subject pronoun construction, across varieties of English. Four different indexes of lexical specificity are computed by resorting to the family of collostructional analyses and regression modelling strategies. Following previous claims in the literature, the study tests whether there exists a correlation between a variety’s developmental stage in the Dynamic Model and how substantive or schematic its constructional representations are. The results shed light on the adequacy of different methods to measure lexical specificity and show that, for competing constructions, it is necessary to employ methods that rigorously account for syntactic variation.