Morphosyntactic persistence in spoken English

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Language users tend to re-use familiar morphosyntactic material, leading to persistent linguistic patterns in discourse. This book presents the first extensive corpus analysis of the factors influencing this persistence, employing regression analyses across various functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external dimensions. It examines case studies such as the use of synthetic versus analytic comparatives, the s-genitive versus the of-genitive, gerundial versus infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker selection across diverse spoken English registers and geographical varieties. By offering a probabilistic framework, the work explores how persistence, alongside other factors, shapes linguistic choices. Distinct from traditional studies, it bridges multiple research traditions, combining insights from variationist sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis. The aim is to construct a comprehensive model of linguistic choice-making, contributing to a broader understanding of spoken language dynamics. This research is particularly relevant for graduate students and scholars in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.