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10 - Uncovering the Big Picture

Measuring the Typological Relatedness of Varieties of English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2021

By
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Edited by
Danae Perez ,
Marianne Hundt ,
Johannes Kabatek  and
Daniel Schreier
Danae Perez
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
Marianne Hundt
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
Johannes Kabatek
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
Daniel Schreier
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
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Summary

This contribution surveys various large-scale quantitative techniques that have been utilized in the literature on varieties and dialects of English to determine their typological relatedness: (a) aggregative measures of distance or similarity, based on atlas or survey data; (b) typological profiling, a technique that draws on naturalistic text corpora to calculate usage- and frequency-based measures of grammatical analyticity and syntheticity; (c) a corpus-based method, inspired by work in information theory, that is designed to map out varieties based on how they differ in terms of language/dialect complexity: and (d) an approach to calculate distances between varieties as a function of the extent to which grammatical variation patterns in usage data are dissimilar.

Keywords

Dialecttypologyrelatednesssimilarityaggregationanalyticitysyntheticitycomplexityvariation
Type
Chapter
Information
English and Spanish
World Languages in Interaction
 , pp. 184 - 208
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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