Case and agreement variation in contact

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of language contact on morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes, specifically focusing on the joint variation of case and agreement in it-clefts with pronominal clefted constituents. Employing a multifactorial approach within the framework of probabilistic grammar, we examine the distribution of the four relevant it-cleft variants in the GloWbE corpus. We find that language contact, as a language-external factor, impacts the strengths and rankings of language-internal factors but not their directions. Additionally, we observe an intricate interplay between language contact and language-internal factors in shaping morphosyntactic patterns: low-contact varieties tend to display feature-based case and agreement with a high degree of variability, while high-contact varieties tend to exhibit position-based case and agreement with a low degree of variability. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the development of language diversity and structural simplification in World Englishes.