New Empirical Approaches to Grammatical Variation and Change

Research on grammatical variation and change has traditionally been based on diachronic and synchronic corpus analysis, but the growing importance of experimental approaches to the study of language has led many researchers to combine corpus study with experimentation to systematically examine linguistic variability and stability. Using experimental or otherwise innovative approaches to the study of grammatical variation and change can help advance these fields methodologically and broaden their empirical base, open up new perspectives on the phenomena under investigation, and inform theory building. Experimental or combined approaches may provide answers to the question of how constraints imposed by the language processing system influence speakers’ usage preferences in variation contexts, or why certain grammatical variants become part of an existing grammar or become dominant, while other variants disappear or become marked options. The idea for this special issue emerged from a workshop on “Multi-methodological Approaches to Synchronic and Diachronic Variation” which we organized in 2019 at the University of Potsdam. This workshop aimed to bring together researchers investigating language variation and change from different theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives. The goals of this special issue are to provide readers with a selective overview of current research in the area of diachronic and synchronic variation, and to emphasize the usefulness of combining different empirical methods to gain more comprehensive insights into grammatical variation than can be obtained from traditional corpus analyses alone. Note that there is only partial overlap between the workshop contributors and the contributors to this special issue. For the latter, a separate call for papers was initiated through Languages and all contributions were peer-reviewed by experts in the relevant fields. This special issue includes a total of eight original research articles which draw together theory-oriented and empirical investigations based on experimental, multi-methodological, and other innovative approaches to investigate diachronic (De Troij and Van de Velde; Truswell; Wallenberg, Bailes, Cuskley and Ingason) and synchronic (Bader and Portele; Felser and Jessen; Günther; Miglio and Gries; Sanfelici and Schulz) variation patterns. Between them, these articles discuss grammatical variation and change from a range of different methodological and empirical perspectives. The three articles focusing on diachronic change base their investigations on corpus analyses of historical English (Truswell; Wallenberg et al.), Icelandic (Wallenberg et al.), and Dutch (De Troij and Van de Velde), and include computational approaches to model linguistic variation patterns. The studies investigating synchronic variation have used a variety of experimental methods such as acceptability judgements (Bader and Portele; Felser and Jessen; Miglio and Gries), split rating tasks (Günther), self-paced reading (Felser and Jessen; Günther), or a combination of these, examining speakers’ performance patterns in both language production (Felser and Jessen; Sanfelici and Schulz) and comprehension (Bader and Portele; Felser and Jessen; Günther; Miglio and Gries). Between them the experimental investigations cover several