# Syntactic Variation Across the Grammar: Modelling a Complex Adaptive System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11869/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Accelerated Hierarchical Density Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07321/) (2017)
- [Mapping Languages: The Corpus of Global Language Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00798/) (2020)
- [Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06820/) (2021)
- [Dialectometric analysis of language variation in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.06777/) (2017)
- [Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05527/) (2019)
- [A Neural Model for User Geolocation and Lexical Dialectology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04008/) (2017)
- [Crowdsourcing Dialect Characterization through Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.7094/) (2014)
- [Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05529/) (2019)
- [Finding Variants for Construction-Based Dialectometry: A Corpus-Based Approach to Regional CxGs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01299/) (2021)
- [Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Towards a Computational Dialectology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01306/) (2021)
- [Modeling the Complexity and Descriptive Adequacy of Construction Grammars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05588/) (2019)
- [Mapping the Americanization of English in Space and Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00781/) (2017)
- [Production vs Perception: The Role of Individuality in Usage-Based Grammar Induction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09033/) (2021)
- [Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05663/) (2021)
- [Exposure and Emergence in Usage-Based Grammar: Computational Experiments in 35 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14160/) (2022)
- [Stability of Syntactic Dialect Classification Over Space and Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04958/) (2022)
- [Language Identification for Austronesian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04327/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Constructicon: Linguistic Analysis of a Computational CxG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12642/) (2023)
- [Variation and Instability in Dialect-Based Embedding Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14963/) (2023)
- [A Character-level Convolutional Neural Network for Distinguishing Similar Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07568/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Entropy and type-token ratio in gigaword corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10227/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures at different levels of abstraction, is reduced to a few disconnected variables. This paper quantifies the impact of such reductions by systematically modelling dialectal variation across 49 local populations of English speakers in 16 countries. We perform dialect classification with both an entire grammar as well as with isolated nodes within the grammar in order to characterize the syntactic differences between these dialects. The results show, first, that many individual nodes within the grammar are subject to variation but, in isolation, none perform as well as the grammar as a whole. This indicates that an important part of syntactic variation consists of interactions between different parts of the grammar. Second, the results show that the similarity between dialects depends heavily on the sub-set of the grammar being observed: for example, New Zealand English could be more similar to Australian English in phrasal verbs but at the same time more similar to UK English in dative phrases.