Dunn, J. (2025). “Diffusion Across the Grammar: Complexity in Areal Interactions Between Dialects of English.” In Enrique-Arias, Andrés, Carlota de Benito Moreno and Florencio del Barrio de la Rosa (eds.). The spatial diffusion of linguistic changes: new methods and theoretical perspectives. Berlin: De Gruyter. Studies in Language Change 26.
Abstract. This paper experiments with the diffusion of syntactic variants within a complex system by operationalizing both (i) the network structure of the grammar and (ii) the network structure of the speech community. Drawing on both computational syntax and computational sociolinguistics, synchronic similarity measures between 505 local dialects are used to capture diachronic processes of diffusion. The results show that similarity measures (and thus the processes of diffusion that they reflect) differ according to the neighborhood of the grammar being observed. This means that the diffusion of grammatical constructions operates according to the network structure of the grammar. By implication, this means that studies of individual features in isolation are unable to accurately observe diffusion as a phenomenon in its entirety.
Data and Supplementary Material: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SUZY9
Jonathan Dunn 