This paper investigates whether the position of adverb phrases in sentences is regionally patterned in written Standard American English, based on an analysis of a 25 million word corpus of letters to the editor representing the language of 200 cities from across the United States. Seven measures of adverb position were tested for regional patterns using the global spatial autocorrelation statistic Moran’s I and the local spatial autocorrelation statistic Getis-Ord Gi*. Three of these seven measures were indentified as exhibiting significant levels of spatial autocorrelation, contrasting the language of the Northeast with language of the Southeast and the South Central states. These results demonstrate that continuous regional grammatical variation exists in American English and that regional linguistic variation exists in written Standard English.
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机译:本文分析了写给美国编辑的代表美国200个城市的语言的2500万个单词的字母语料库,分析了句子中副词短语在书写的标准美式英语中是否按区域排列。使用全局空间自相关统计量Moran's I和局部空间自相关统计量Getis-Ord Gi *对副词位置的七个量度进行了区域模式测试。可以确定这七个量度中的三个表现出显着水平的空间自相关,将东北的语言与东南和中南部的语言进行了对比。这些结果表明,美国英语中存在连续的区域语法变化,而书面标准英语中存在区域语言变化。
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