Corpus-based Studies Research Articles

Effects of Both Preemption and Entrenchment in the Retreat from Verb Overgeneralization Errors: Four Reanalyses, an Extended Replication, and a Meta-Analytic Synthesis

How do speakers avoid producing verb overgeneralization errors such as *She covered paint onto the wall or *She poured the cup with water? Five previous papers have found seemingly contradictory results concerning the role of statistical preemption (competition from acceptable alternatives such as She covered the wall with paint or She poured water into the cup) and entrenchment (a mechanism sensitive to all uses of the relevant verb). Here, we use more appropriate measures of preemption and entrenchment (attraction measures based on the chi-square statistic, as opposed to using only the frequency of occurrence in favoured constructions) as well as more appropriate statistical analyses and, in one case, a larger corpus to reanalyse the data from these studies. We find that for errors of verb argument structure overgeneralization (as in the examples above), preemption/entrenchment effects are almost always observed in single-predictor models, but are rarely dissociable, due to collinearity. Fortunately, this problem is much less acute for errors of reversative un- prefixation (e.g., *unsqueeze; *uncome), which could in principle be blocked by (a) non-reversative uses of the same verb root (e.g., squeeze, come; entrenchment), and/or (b) lexically-unrelated verbs with similar meanings to the relevant un- forms (e.g., release, go; preemption). Across a reanalysis of two previous studies of un- prefixation, and a new extended replication with adults, we find dissociable effects of both preemption and entrenchment. A meta-analytic synthesis revealed that, across the studies, both effects are reliable, though preemption appears to increase with age. We conclude that a successful account of the retreat from verb overgeneralization is likely to be one that yields preemption and entrenchment as effects that fall naturally out of the learner’s attempts to communicate meaning, rather than one that treats these effects as mechanisms in their own right, and discuss current accounts that potentially meet this criterion. Finally, we set out some methodological recommendations that can be profitably applied not only to corpus-based experimental studies, but studies of child language acquisition in general.

Expression Plane of English Idioms in Gender Semantics Studies

In recent years gender studies have become connected with language studies, because language reflects, records and transmits social, cultural and gender differences. Idioms in any language transfer underlying ideas, principles and values of this particular society or culture, so they are considered as the main source for gender studies in linguistics. This paper deals with corpus-based studies of English idioms with gender components. The authors analyze the expression plane of English idioms and give a model representation of English gender-marked idioms. The method of identification of key lexical items has been applied. As a result, the dominant gender lexical items in English gender-marked idioms have been identified and ranked on the basis of their frequency. The authors have also revealed the most/least common gender components and gender oppositions in English idioms.

Semantic preference and semantic prosody- a theoretical overview

Abstract: Semantic preference and semantic prosody are two notions that were carefully analysed in post-Firthian corpus linguistics and in the past few years there has been a growing interest in them. As corpora have become larger in size, and tools for extracting different lexical items for different purposes have been developed, the two terms have been addressed more frequently by linguists1. Throughout history, semantic preference and semantic prosody have sometimes been used for the same phenomenon but at other times the two were considered different but closely related. Previous corpus-based studies on the two terms have shown that they can be attached to many investigated lexical items. Therefore, this paper aims to present a detailed theoretical overview of the two terms in order to emphasise their immense importance for identifying the meaning of all the lexical items.

Corpus-assisted Analysis of Discursive Practices in Russian-language Genre of Press-release

Based on a comparative analysis of multiword keywords, this study provides insights into discursive practices used in Russian-language press releases. Although company press releases have been the object of intensive research, there is a lack of corpus-based studies in this field, especially with regard to the Russian-language texts. The present research investigates three corpora of various sizes that contain Russian companies’ press releases retrieved from some companies’ websites. With the SketchEngine tool [1], multiword keywords were identified and compared to provide insights into how words are employed to construe patterns of meaning in the genre under consideration. The results obtained show differences between the corpora with regard to the keywords identified, which suggests that lexical choices might indicate different values in discursive practices that are used to construe the company image and reach stakeholders and general public.

Von "diutisk" zu "dynamisch", von "englisc" zu "anything-ish". "­is(c)h" kontrastiv diachron

German -isch and English -ish share a common Germanic origin, which is evidenced by striking similarities concerning the derivation of ethnic adjectives (englisch/English) or property-denoting adjectives (kindisch/childish). However, after an initial period of parallel characteristics, the two languages display drastic changes, with English developing an approximative sense when attached to adjectival bases (e.g. greenish) and expanding to a wide range of other word categories, while German -isch develops multiple functions and also comes to firmly occupy a morphological niche with non-native bases. The paper sheds light on the evolving divergence between German and English by presenting results from two diachronic corpus-based studies. Additionally, explanations with respect to the typological parameter of 'Boundary Permeability' are provided. Dieser Beitrag ist ursprünglich im Peter-Lang-Verlag erschienen (https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/plg/jwf/2018/00000002/00000001/art00005)

A crosslinguistic study of some extended uses of what-based interrogative expressions in Chinese, English, and Korean

Abstract Interrogative pronouns such as what in English, shenme in Mandarin Chinese, and mwe/mwusun in Korean all have developed extended uses beyond interrogation. Such uses may include filling a gap in conversation, softening a speaker’s epistemic stance, and indicating strong emotions such as surprises or incredulity. Yet there is little research dealing with crosslinguistic patterns with large corpora of interactive discourse data. In this paper, we investigate the extended uses based on corpora of multiple telephone calls from the three languages. We show that eight categories of extended use can be identified in the corpora and that most of the extended uses tend to fall in the negative territory. We provide a pragmatic interactive account for this phenomenon and hope that the taxonomy and coding scheme developed here can serve as a starting point for future crosslinguistic and corpus-based comparative studies of what-like tokens as well as of the discourse pragmatic uses of other interrogative forms.

Finding a model for contrastive lexical semantics: A look at verbal communication verbs

A basic problem for contrastive lexical studies in general is to find a model for the semantic analysis. This paper is one in a series of corpus-based contrastive studies of the field of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in English and Swedish. Searle’s classification of speech acts serves as an important starting point but is not directly concerned with lexical structure, which is a major concern for the two theories that are compared in this study. FrameNet based on Fillmore’s theory of semantic frames and Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primitives (or “primes”). The theories are applied and tested on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) containing English and Swedish original texts together with their translations into the other language. Primarily two groups of English verbs and their Swedish correspondents will be analyzed: (1) Information verbs such as tell, inform, notify, report, narrate and describe and (2) Speech activity verbs such as talk, speak, chat, converse, gossip, discuss, debate, negotiate and bargain. There is also an analysis of Swedish berätta ‘tell, narrate’ based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC) as an example of multilingual contrastive analysis. Frames relate in a clear way the conceptual structure and the syntactic argument structure, which is very useful in a contrastive study. However, the definition of the meaning of individual verbs is incomplete and needs to be complemented with some kind of decompositional analysis such as the theory of semantic primes. A special section is devoted to an analysis of a large number of compound and derived forms of the Swedish verb tala ‘speak’ and a discussion of how contrasts in morphological structure can affect the lexical contrasts between two languages.

Verbal prefixation and realizations of antipassive alternations in Polish

Various works on transitivity suggest that aspectual notions may constitute semantic determinants of argument realization. Observations included in these works prompted theories implying that argument realization may be aspectually driven. Following this line of thought, this article presents the results of corpus-based studies on antipassive structure in the Polish language and makes an attempt at confirming the fact that aspectual notion may determine argument realization.
 The article consists of three main sections. The first one focuses on notions of aspect and various aspectual propositions distinguished in the literature on the subject, regarding the Polish language in particular. The second section, illustrated with examples extracted from the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) and the corpus of Wielki Słownik Języka Polskiego (KWSJP), gives an overview of Polish perfectivizing verbal prefixes, i.e. a roz‑, na-, o-/ob- and u-prefix, and deals with the effect they may have on sentence structure and semantics. It also shows how the prefixed verbs combine with the marker się, which flags antipassive, i.e. is a recurring marker attested in antipassive constructions in the Polish language. In section three, an attempt is made at analyzing the interrelations between aspect and antipassive reading of a structure. As it seems that a perfective prefix used with a verb imposes certain requirements on the argument structure of the verb it combines with, we also offer a possible explanation to different aspectual requirements of verbs occurring in antipassive structures, assuming that projections coded in a verb may play a role here.

A corpus-based study of semantic differences in translation

AbstractThis paper presents a corpus-driven, statistical method for the visualization of semantic structure, thereby tackling the under-researched issue of semantics in corpus-based Translation Studies. We aim to investigate the influence of translation on the structure of semantic fields and in particular the extent to which the structure of the semantic field of inchoativity differs between original, non-translated Dutch and translated Dutch. The visualizations of the semantic field of inchoativity show that translated Dutch indeed differs from non-translated Dutch on the semantic level. Based on the exploration of the semantic fields, we furthermore formulate some hypotheses concerning the presence of the so-called universal tendencies of translation on the semantic level.

The Web as Corpus in Translation

This thesis introduces corpus-based practices and studies in translation, including monocorpus, parallel corpus and web (as corpus) using in translation. Making an effective query on internet has been demonstrated in this thesis by WebCONC, Webcorp and KWiCFinder alike, and 9 corpus tools have also been listed in the thesis to facilitate translation practices and studies.

Canadian Dollar in the English Language Varieties: Corpus‑Based Study

The slang name for Canadian dollar loonie is a Canadianism used not only in spoken (Boberg, 2010: 121), but also in written texts such as Canadian news articles. While loonie is obviously taken for granted by Canadians, its occurrence in English texts published beyond Canada has hardly been in the focus of corpus-based studies. The goal of this study is to find out in what Canadian English written texts loonie occurs and whether it is encountered in the other varieties of English by researching the corpora adapted for web access at Brigham Young University (BYU), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English (SCCE), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). The first two corpora were searched to reveal the genres of the written texts loonie occurs and GloWbE – to see loonie used in the other varieties of English. The obtained results revealed that loonie occurs in such written texts as newspaper and magazine articles of SCCE and COCA predominantly in the contexts connected with money issues. Search of GloWbE showed the use of loonie in American and British mass media texts, which reveals that this Canadian slang name goes beyond Canadian texts and thus, as Davies (2005: 45) has stated ‘[...] few of us are cocooned from [...] vocabulary of the major international varieties of English’. These findings therefore call for more detailed research of the collocations containing loonie in various text types of different varieties of English.

Language Learning Research at the Intersection of Experimental, Computational, and Corpus‐Based Approaches

Language Learning Research at the Intersection of Experimental, Computational, and Corpus‐Based Approaches

Exploring Learner Language Through Corpora: Comparing and Interpreting Corpus Frequency Information

This article contributes to the debate about the appropriate use of corpus data in language learning research. It focuses on frequencies of linguistic features in language use and their comparison across corpora. The majority of corpus‐based second language acquisition studies employ a comparative design in which either one or more second language (L2) corpora are compared to a first language (L1) production corpus or two or more L2 corpora are compared to each other. This article critically examines some of the central tenets of the comparative method related to the interspeaker variation in L1 and L2 use, the representativeness and comparability of corpus data, the interpretation of difference found between corpora and the appropriate use of statistics. Using and discussing a set of five L1 spoken English corpora and three L2 English corpora (two spoken and one written), we approach these areas empirically exploring different sources of variations and methodological options that corpus‐based SLA studies offer.

Translation and editing: a study of editorial treatment of nominalisations in draft translations

ABSTRACTThough editing and revising are integral parts of translation, their effects on the language of the final translated text have scarcely been studied. The phenomena we observe in translated text are usually attributed to ‘the translator’, even though the multitude of agents involved in translation may also be responsible for them to various degrees. This paper defends the use of manuscripts in corpus-based Translation Studies by investigating differences in nominalisation between unedited and edited translations. Using a corpus of manuscript and published German translations of English business articles, I investigate what may motivate editors to replace a nominalisation in the translation manuscript by a verb to match the English source text. For this purpose, I analyse differences in the process types of the nominalised source text verbs and the structure and information density of the nominal group the nominalisation appears in. The findings show that editors exert extensive and systematic influence on the translated text. Crucially, the analysis shows that, if we only consider the published version of a translation, we might consider sentences as literal translations which in reality have undergone a considerable amount of shifts while passing through the stages of translation.

A Meta-analysis of the research trend of Korea’s translation and interpreting education

This paper aims at conducting meta-analysis in order to understand the features and trends of researches on Korea’s TI 2) research trends consist of three topics - teaching(69.13%), learning(23.48%), and assessment(6.96%); 3) methodologically, case and survey studies were more active, while corpus-based, correlational, and theoretical studies were relatively inactive. The future direction for researches on T&I education is suggested as follows. Firstly, integrated trans-lingual T&I education studies are needed as opposed to the current trend of T&I education researches mostly focusing on Korean-English T&I education. Secondly, it is necessary to establish more systematic methodologies that consider learners individual characteristics such as conducting aptitude test, verifying individual characteristics and competence, and assessing expertise of learners. Thirdly, cooperation with the clients in the market is required in order to develop more practical T&I education and assessment methodologies. Lastly, more effort should be put to establish T&I pedagogy as a subdiscipline of T&I studies in order to further revitalize theoretical researches on T&I education.

The Cultural Aspect of Discourse Markers among Non-Native English-Korean Communication

본 연구는, 제2외국어로서 영어 학습 능률에서 담화표지는 문화적 행위로 간주되는 측면이 많다는 가정 하에 영어와 한국어 각각의 담화표지에 대한 고찰이다. 연구 결과도 역시 제2영어를 하는 한국대학생들에게 영어의 담화표지는 어색하고 발화행위 분포가 고르지 못하다는 점을 밝힌다. 한국어 모국어 화자는 담화표지를 많이 하지 않지 만, 영어를 모국어로 하는 한국어 제2언어 학습자는 발화행위에서 평균 이상으로 많이 담화표지를 한다는 결론이다. 이에 대한 비교 분석의 그래프를 통해 담화표지의 종류와 발화 횟수, 퍼센티지를 비교분석 한다. 결과적으로 본 논문에서는 영어의 담화표 지는 영어 모국어 화자에게는 하나의 문화행위로서 자연스럽게 따라오는 언어행위의 문화적 양태로 결론지을 수 있으며, 한국어의 담화표지는 말을 잘 할 때 담화표지의 수와 종류가 줄어드는 것을 발견했다. 때문에 한국어 유창성과 한국어 담화표지는 반비례한다고 할 수 있지만, 영어모국어 화자로서 제2 한국어 학습자는 유난히 한국어의 담화표지를 많이 함으로써 그들의 문화 발화행위의 단면을 발견하게 된다. 한국어 담화표지에 대한 학습은 외국어로서의 한국어 교육에는 굳이 필요하지 않지만, 영어를 배우는 제2영어 학습자에게는 영어의 담화표지 학습이 필요함을 도출한다.Despite the important role discourse markers play in everyday native spoken interactions, there are only few spoken corpus-based studies on how Korean speakers use English discourse markers, particularly in their spontaneous English communication. On the other hand, English native speakers tend to use corpus-based Korean discourse markers. Using a speech task that encourages spontaneous English conversations by Korean speakers, this paper elicits the forms, relative frequencies, and usage of English discourse markers. Researching both the usage of English and Korean discourse markers by non-natives, this paper indicates that Korean ESL learners use limited and less variety of discourse markers compared with English native speakers. This paper shows that Korean speakers’ usage of certain English discourse markers may be quantitatively and qualitatively different from the typical native usage. It is relatively natural that English native speakers use yeah (어, 음) of Korean discourse markers in the act of Korean speeches. It is concluded that English discourse markers need to be taught in both explicit and implicit manners in classroom settings. It is significant, since the proper use of discourse markers plays a significant role in enabling Korean speakers to communicate in English in a more situationally and culturally appropriate manner. However, Korean discourse markers are less important for English TOPIK learners in Korean communication.

Tagungsbericht / Conference report: "Wen wurmt der Ohrwurm? An Interdisciplinary, Cross-Lingual Perspective on the Role of Constituents in Multi-Word Expressions"

Organized by Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart) and Eva Smolka (University of Konstanz) as part of the 39th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) held at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, the workshop aimed “to shed light on the interaction of constituent properties and compound transparency across languages and disciplines integrating linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational studies”. The workshop brought together researchers from linguistics, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing and comprised 11 contributed talks, framed by two invited talks by Gary Libben and Marco Marelli. Most of the slides are available from the workshop’s homepage at http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/events/dgfs-mwe-17/program.html.

Beyond aspect: The expression of discourse functions in African languages ed. by Doris L. Payne and Shahar Shirtz

Reviewed by: Beyond aspect: The expression of discourse functions in African languages ed. by Doris L. Payne and Shahar Shirtz Stéphane Robert Beyond aspect: The expression of discourse functions in African languages. Ed. by Doris L. Payne and Shahar Shirtz. (Typological studies in language 109.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Pp. vii, 321. ISBN 9789027206909. $149 (Hb). This volume presents a series of corpus-based studies analyzing the various grammatical devices used to express discourse functions and to structure narratives in some ten African languages. Thanks to the editors’ efforts in setting up comparative concepts, the scope of this book doubtless goes far beyond African linguistics and should interest descriptive linguists and typologists, as well as specialists of discourse studies. The book opens with an introductory and synthetic chapter by the editors. The nine following articles, each devoted to studies on particular languages, are then ordered along language families (or phyla) of Africa. In their substantial introductory article ‘Discourse structuring and typology: How strong is the link with aspect?’ (1–22), Shahar Shirtz and Doris Payne very clearly define the scientific context and the general approach used here. As a common ground, the authors propose to rely on Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) definitions of (a) ‘narrative’ as a sequence of nonoverlapping (thus bounded and perfective) events, and (b) the main event line (henceforth MEL, identified here with ‘foreground’) of a narrative as including propositions expressed in an isomorphic (or iconic) order to the story events. Based on previous studies and the studies in this book, Shirtz and Payne have identified seven major types of verbs or constructions used crosslinguistically to communicate foreground or MEL, in opposition to devices for background or non-MEL: (1) verbal constructions coding past-perfect(ive) or at least bounded or completive tense-aspect semantics, (2) verbal constructions coding ‘situational dependency’ (Robert 2010) of that proposition on some frame of reference, (3) syntactically independent clauses, (4) syntactically dependent clause chaining, (5) clause conjunction, (6) Austronesian-type voice, and (7) word order. Elaborating on these various points, they have discovered that there is not always a correlation between the MEL and grammatical aspect: the putative correlation between past-perfective tense-aspect forms and expression of the narrative MEL is not universally valid. After summarizing the main contributions of the various articles, Shirtz and Payne briefly present three specific models, all grounded in cognitive linguistics, which have been fruitfully used by several authors in this book for analyzing discourse structuring: those of Fauconnier (1994 [1985]), Dinsmore (1991), and Botne and Kerschner (2008). They rightfully conclude with a broader invitation for typology and cognitive sciences to collaborate on investigating the grammar-discourse interface in a crosslinguistic perspective. The Nilo-Saharan family is illustrated first by Doris Payne’s ‘Aspect and thematic clause combining in Maa (Nilotic)’ (23–52). This article is remarkable both in the thorough analyses conducted on a corpus of narratives and in the use made of Fauconnier’s (1994 [1985]) model for this analysis of discourse structuring. Exploring whether this language has a dedicated morphosyntax for coding the temporally sequenced MEL in discourse, Payne first demonstrates that, though it can occur on sequential and semantically perfective main events, the uses of the so-called narrative [End Page 243] form (commonly attested in African languages) are not limited to marking narrative events, and she argues for a new characterization as marking ‘high thematic continuity between equally-ranked propositions’ (23). As for the form previously treated as a perfective aspect or a past tense, its various uses for indicating anteriority or relevance for the present (or current) space lead her to recategorize it convincingly as a perfect. Payne shows that this verb form is not used to demarcate foregrounded MEL material from nonsequential background but rather to initiate a mental space that elaborates or justifies the claim about a previously reported fact. The next article, by Helen Eaton, ‘Main event line structure and aspect in Sandawe narratives’ (53–80), focuses on an isolated language spoken in Tanzania. Eaton argues that Sandawe does not have a specific verb form that fulfills the function of advancing the MEL in a narrative, nor does...

The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology ed. by Rochelle Lieber, Pavol Štekauer

Reviewed by: The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology ed. by Rochelle Lieber, Pavol Štekauer Geert Booij The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology. Ed. by Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Štekauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 927. ISBN 9780199641642. $55. This handbook is the second in a series of four Oxford University Press handbooks on morphology, of which one, also edited by Lieber and Štekauer (2009), deals with compounding, one with inflection (edited by Matthew Baerman, 2015), and a fourth one (to appear in 2017) with morphological theory (edited by Jenny Audring and Francesca Masini). The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with a number of concepts and issues in the analysis of derivation (understood as all types of word formation minus compounding) and contains a number of chapters on the various types of formal processes involved in derivation (twenty-four chapters in total). Part II consists of fifteen chapters on word formation in various language families, a chapter on ‘Areal tendencies in derivation’, and a concluding chapter on ‘Universals in derivation’ written by the two editors. After an introductory chapter by the editors that specifies the scope of the handbook, we find two chapters on demarcation issues. In Ch. 2, Pius ten Hacken deals with the demarcation of inflection and derivation and presents a useful survey of the debate on this distinction. He correctly points out that the choices made in the demarcation of these two domains of morphology are theory-dependent. The distinction between contextual and inherent inflection, the latter being closer to derivation than contextual inflection, is not mentioned, nor is the discussion of the intermediate cases in Andrew Spencer’s monograph on Lexical relatedness (Spencer 2013). In Ch. 3, Susan Olsen gives a fine overview of the debate on the demarcation of derivation and compounding. She presents a good summary of the gray zone between compounding and derivation, and the related issue of the gradual transition of words to affixes (that is, semi-affixes or affixoids, which are words embedded in compounds and with a specific bound meaning, as discussed in Booij & Hüning 2014). Olsen also deals with synthetic compounding and the analysis of synthetic compounds such as powerholder, which might be analyzed as either power + holder or powerhold +er; she opts for the first analysis and therefore assigns powerholder the structure of an N + N compound. She correctly points out that certain types of reduplication may also be analyzed as compounding, for instance, the contrastive reduplication of the type salad-salad. Ch. 4, ‘Theoretical approaches to derivation’ by Rochelle Lieber, focuses on the issue of how the relation between the form and meaning of complex words should be conceived. Both the conceptual level and the phonological level have a rich structure. As to the mapping between [End Page 717] these two levels, it would have been enlightening to relate this issue to the model of parallel architecture (Jackendoff 2002), in which the level of morphosyntactic structure plays a mediating role between conceptual and phonological structure at the level of the word (Booij 2010). Ch. 5, written by Mark Aronoff and Mark Lindsay, argues that in the domain of morphology, language is not a discrete phenomenon: we have to accept that there are degrees of productivity. The authors discuss methods for measuring the degree of productivity of a word-formation process. Ch. 6, ‘Methodological issues in studying derivation’, also by Rochelle Lieber, mentions the potential pitfall of using intuitions in morphological research: corpus-based studies reveal that much more is possible and occurs than one might think on the basis of one’s own intuitions. This is also my own experience. For the domain of English morphology, this insight has been convincingly demonstrated to be valid in Bauer et al. 2013. In addition, an experimental approach to word-formation phenomena is also important, and Lieber observes a convergence between these two methodologies in studying word formation. In the following chapter (Ch. 7), Harald Baayen gives an overview of experimental and psycholinguistic approaches to word formation. The central issue is whether and how morphological structure plays a role...

Variation as a testing ground for grammatical theory

This paper addresses the contribution that corpus-based studies of syntactic variation can make to the construction, elaboration and testing of formal syntactic theories, with a particular focus on the testing dimension. In particular, I present a new empirical study of obligatory and optional asymmetric negative concord phenomena, and I show how an influential analysis for obligatory concord patterns (de Swart, 2010) can be tested using variation data through looking at the predictions that its natural probabilistic extension makes for the forms, interpretations and frequency distributions of expressions in languages in which asymmetric concord is optional. In obligatory negative concord languages like Spanish, negative indefinites, such asnadie‘no one’, appear bare in preverbal position (i.e. in an expression like Nadieha venido‘No one came’), but they co-occur with the negative markernoin postverbal negative concord structures such as Nohe visto anadie ‘I did not see anyone.’ (lit. ‘I did not see no one.’). Furthermore, in this language, co-occurrence between a negative marker and an n-word is either prohibited (*Nadie noha venido), or it is obligatory (*He visto anadie). Québec French shows a variable version of the Spanish pattern in which the negation marker optionally co-occurs with postverbal negative indefinites (J’ai (pas) vupersonne ‘I saw no one’) but is prohibited with preverbal negative indefinites*Personneestpasvenu(Ok: Personneest venu.‘No one came’). I show how the predictions for Montréal French of de Swart’s analysis of Spanish can be tested (and, in this case, mostly verified) using a quantitative study of the distribution of bare and concord structures in theMontréal 84corpus of spoken Montréal French (Thibault & Vincent, 1990) through looking at its natural extension within Boersma (1998)’s stochastic generalization of the Optimality Theory framework, which is the framework in which de Swart’s proposal is set.