Lexical Specificity and Allostructional Variation: Subject Pronoun Omission in World Englishes

• Iván Tamaredo Meira ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 118-124
• Idioma: inglés
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• 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.