Consistency in variation [electronic resource] : on the provenance of end-weight
Keywords: Linguistics.

Language scholars as far back as Behaghel (1909) have noted the tendency to produce short before long. What underlies this principle of end-weight? Several accounts that develop an incremental view of production—speakers produce what they can as soon as they can—may be seen as necessarily motivated by a constrained capacity view of human cognitive faculties. Such resources—for example, working memory capacity—typically vary across the population, while the preference for end-weight has previously been modeled as fixed across the population. In the present work, it is argued that if the principle of end-weight is motivated by limits on such an underlying resource that varies by individual, we should see significant variation by individual in strength of preference for end-weight. Corpus and experimental studies subsequently confirm significant individual variation in strength of such preferences. Next, we see the principle of end-weight at play in several English syntactic-alternation constructions, including dative shift, verb-particle placement, prepositional phrase ordering, and heavy-NP shift, among others. Looking across these constructions, if individual preference for end-weight is motivated by a limited, underlying cognitive resource, such a resource should nevertheless remain constant within each individual across constructions. Having thus found individual variation in the principle of end-weight, a given speaker's strength of preference may be expected to remain relatively steady across constructions—that is, consistency in variation. Testing this proposition presents a methodological challenge. Existing syntactically parsed corpora of natural speech are generally built shallow—many speakers but insufficient contributions per speaker to model individual end-weight preference. To address this, a deep parsed corpus is developed—yielding up to 2.5M words per speaker—as well as novel statistical approaches for exploring correlation of per-speaker preferences across models of separate constructions. Multiple studies with this corpus and complementary experiments indicate a significant measure of consistency in each individual's relative strength of end-weight preference across constructions, as predicted. These results do not prove constrained capacity; other compatible accounts include the possibility that we develop individual production preferences through exposure to prior distributions. If so, though, the results above introduce the provision that in developing our individual production preferences, each speaker synthesizes a single rule—or at least a substantially consistent preference—across different syntactic-alternation constructions. This may be seen as a syntactic neighborhood effect. Finally, though, a pair of prior studies suggest that Australians may show greater strength of preference for end-weight in the dative-shift alternation than Americans, an effect of group that is compatible with exposure to differing prior distributions but not at all predicted by constrained capacity. If preference is variable by individual but consistent across constructions—as the core of the present work indicates—might we expect the same at the varietal level? An additional experiment conducted here with American, British, and Australian groups and across four different constructions finds that the Australian preference for end-weight is significantly stronger across the set of constructions. While constrained capacity may be at play in variation by individual, the cross-varietal results support the role of learning by exposure to prior distribution, with syntactic neighborhood effects appearing cross-construction for both individuals and groups.