(There is a later paper on this)
This paper discusses an application of a technique to tag a corpusautomatically and to detect syntactic differences between two varieties of FinnishAustralian English, one spoken by the first generation and the other by the second generation.
The technique utilizes frequency profiles of trigrams of part-of-speech categories as indicators of syntactic distance between the varieties.
The paper examines potential shift effects in language contact. Results show that some interlanguage features in the first generation can be attributed to Finnish substratum transfer. Other features are ascribable to more universal properties of the language faculty or to “vernacular” primitives.