Paper

Drivers of English Syntactic Change in the Canadian Parliament

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Abstract

Corpus linguists have long noted the "colloquialization\'\' of many genres of English. While the average decline in many features of formal speech is obvious in aggregate, we are better able to disentangle drivers of change by examining Canadian parliamentary speeches coded for characteristics of individual speakers across more than 100 years---much longer than previous studies of individuals\' language change in a common environment. While many language changes proceed by cohort replacement and often originate with female speakers, the Canadian Hansard shows that most speakers employed increasingly colloquial language over their careers and that gender effects are mostly explained by the stronger effect of political power. Using multilevel regression, we investigate growing colloquialization by tracing declining passives, modals, and pied-piping relative clauses, and increasing numbers of semi-modals and progressives in the speech patterns of individuals.

Keywords: colloquialization, syntactic change, language change, sociolinguistic variation, corpus linguistics, Canadian English, statistical models, parliamentary debates

How to Cite:

Hou, L. & Smith, D., (2021) “Drivers of English Syntactic Change in the Canadian Parliament”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(1), 51-60. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/wp9w-3e49