Skip to main content
School of the Arts
  1. School of the Arts
  2. Research
  3. Department Research
  4. Linguistics
  5. Linguistics Research Events
  6. Past events
  7. Items
  8. 2016

Ling Lunch talk: Dr Heather Burnett "Using Intra-Speaker Variation to Diagnose Syntactic Structure" | 4 May 2016

4 May 2016

Time: 3:37pm
Venue: Arts One:2.07-g(20)

Heather Burnett

CNRS, Université Paris 7, Denis Diderot

 

Using Intra-Speaker Variation to Diagnose Syntactic Structure

(presenting work with Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)

 

Abstract: In this talk we argue that cross-linguistic studies of patterns of intra-speaker morphosyntactic variation can help solve longstanding puzzles associated with the syntactic structure of the expressions that are in variation. It has been long observed in the field of language variation and change (since Labov, 1966, see the recent discussion in Bresnan 2007 for syntax) that, in addition to social and general cognitive factors, the grammatical structures of synonymous linguistic expressions in a language at least partially determine the patterns of use of these expressions. This paper shows how we can exploit this connection between syntactic structure and language use to contribute to the theoretical debate concerning the syntactic analysis of negative concord sentences in Canadian French.

Back to top