Abstract This study investigates the extent to which there is individuality in how structural variation is conditioned over time. Earlier research already classified the diachronically unstable gerund variation as involving a high fraction of mixed-usage speakers throughout the change, whereby the proportion of the conservative variant versus the progressive variant as observable in the linguistic output of individual language users superficially resembles the mean proportion as observable at the population level. However, this study sets out to show that there can still be heterogeneity within such a centralized population in terms of how each individual conditions the observed variation. A random forest and conditional inference tree analysis of over 14,000 gerunds uttered by nineteen seventeenth-century authors is presented to show that, while the most important language-internal factors conditioning the gerund variation are adopted by (and shared between) all authors, we can still attest inter-individual variation (i) at lower levels of variable importance, and (ii) in the breadth of the range of contexts individual authors employ to condition the attested variation.

中文翻译：

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句法变异中的个性：对十七世纪动名词交替的研究

摘要这项研究调查了随着时间的推移如何调节结构变异的程度。较早的研究已经将历时不稳定的动名词变化归因于整个变化过程中涉及高比例的混合用途说话者，从而在单个语言用户的语言输出中可观察到的保守变体与渐进变体的比例表面上类似于平均比例，即在人口一级可以观察到。但是，这项研究表明，就每个人如何处理观察到的变化而言，在这样一个集中的人群中仍然存在异质性。提出了一个随机的森林和条件推断树分析，该分析由19世纪的17位作者提出，对14,000多个undunds进行了分析，结果表明：