Syntactic Elaboration
Paul Bruthiaux · 1996
Abstract The job of comparing one language variety with another normally presupposes the identification and operationalization of linguistic variables, be they lexical, morphological, or syntactic. This is normally done by identifying a set of linguistic features that can be expected to appear in specific slots-or obligatory contexts-in the literary grammar and by measuring their actual occurrence in the variety under examination. These actually occurring features are then quantified as a proportion of possible occurrences, thus permitting the computation of what might be called structural reduction in this variety.