The increasing capacities of large language models (LLMs) present an unprecedented
opportunity to scale up data analytics in the humanities and social sciences, augmenting …

This paper introduces a new resource designed to facilitate the quantitative investigation of
syntactic variation in spoken language from a comparative perspective. The datasets …

The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of
quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in …

Previous research has tracked the history of the theme-recipient alternation (or:“dative”
alternation) in Chinese, but few studies have embedded their analysis in a probabilistic …

This paper builds on the observation that the animacy effects we find in English genitive
variation are part of a larger cross-linguistic pattern as reflected in possession splits based …

Despite the vast body of literature on the historical development of the theme-recipient
alternation (also known as the “dative” alternation) in Chinese, most studies that have been …

The title of my talk describes two fields of linguistics, which differ in their approaches to data
and analysis and in their fundamental concepts. What I call the garden is traditional …

As Labov (eg 1972: 188) notes,“[i] t is common for a language to have many alternate ways
of saying 'the same'thing”. Such alternants can be found at the level of pronunciation (eg …

Variation studies is an increasingly popular area in linguistics, becoming embedded in
curriculum design, conferences, and research. However, the field is at risk of fragmenting …

In this chapter, we discuss some common pitfalls related to historical data and its use in
linguistic analysis. argue that the “philologist's dilemma”, as originally proposed by Rissanen …