This study investigates regional variation in the lexical items associated with the English dative alternation, that is, the variation between the ditransitive (I give John[recipient] a book[theme]) and the prepositional... [ view full abstract ]
This study investigates regional variation in the lexical items associated with the English dative alternation, that is, the variation between the ditransitive (I give John[recipient] a book[theme]) and the prepositional dative (I give a book[theme] to John[recipient]).
While cross-regional variability in the probabilistic factors that condition the choice between the two variants has been extensively studied (e.g. Bresnan & Hay 2008), little is known about the extent to which lexical considerations – besides the verb – might be cross-regionally malleable. To that end, the present study compares the lexical profiles (i.e. the range and diversity of lexical items associated with either variant) of 13,171 interchangeable dative variants across five non-native – Hong Kong, Indian, Jamaican, Philippine and Singapore English – and four native varieties of English – Canadian, British, Irish, and New Zealand English – sampling data from the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global web-based English. Degrees of association between lexical items and between lexical items and the two variants were measured using collexeme analysis (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004).
Results reveal that speakers of non-native varieties tend to reuse lexical items in both argument slots in the ditransitive variant, suggesting that syntactic variation is lexically more specified in non-native compared to native varieties. These findings not only provide evidence for the cognitive reality of meso-constructions and their role in usage-based models of syntax (Diessel 2016), the study also illustrates how the development of entrenched lexical biases with particular syntactic variants among different language varieties can lead to the emergence of variation in the probabilistic factors governing the choice among more abstract constructional schemas.
References
Bresnan, Joan & Jennifer Hay. 2008. Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English. Lingua 118(2). 245–259.
Diessel, Holger. 2016. Frequency and lexical specificity in grammar: A critical review. In Heike Behrens & Stefan Pfänder (eds.), Experience counts: Frequency effects in language, 209–237. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gries, Stefan Th. & Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on alternations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1). 97–129.
