That's Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

Area of Science:

• Computational Sociolinguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Corpus Linguistics

Background:

• Lexico-grammatical patterns exhibit variation influenced by social and individual factors.
• Understanding individual variation is crucial for comprehending language change.
• The 'that's adj' construction serves as a model for studying such variation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate individual lexico-grammatical variation using the 'that's adj' pattern.
• To analyze the interplay between social, situational, and individual factors in language use.
• To explore the role of speaker routines in driving language change.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a custom Python script to extract data from the BNC2014 corpus.
• Analyzed 4,394 tokens from 445 speakers across 931 conversations.
• Employed descriptive statistics and mixed-effects regression models.

Main Results:

• Identified social variables influencing some adjective choices.
• Demonstrated significant situational and, predominantly, individual variation in pattern usage.
• Interpreted findings through a cognitive-linguistic lens, emphasizing entrenchment and speaker routines.

Conclusions:

• Individual speaker routines are central to lexico-grammatical variation.
• Computational sociolinguistics offers powerful tools for data-driven analysis of individual variation.
• Individual routines underpin and influence systematic social variation, driving language change processes like grammaticalization.