Welcome to a guest lecture on grammatical variation in English and how this can be studied using construction grammar. All interested are welcome!
This talk presents a Computational Construction Grammar analysis of register and regional variation across large English corpora, covering two digital registers (tweets and YouTube transcripts) and five inner-circle varieties. We show that both sources of variation produce systematic, largely independent patterns in the constructional network, but differ in where they manifest: register effects are more pervasive and concentrated in abstract, high-level constructions, while regional effects are sparser and surface in lower-level constructions. We account for this asymmetry in terms of a continuum of constructional salience, and discuss implications for integrating sociolinguistic theory into Construction Grammar.