Ditransitives in Middle English: on semantic specialisation and the rise of the dative alternation

Zehentner, Eva

doi:10.1017/s1360674316000447

Cited by 45 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…In the remainder of this article, we demonstrate how such an enterprise may be carried out, using the wellknown box formalism of Construction Grammar (cf. also Barðdal & Eythórsson 2012b, Barðdal & Smitherman 2013, Danesi, Johnson & Barðdal 2017, 2018.…”

Section: The Syntactic Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic

Vázquez-González

Barðdal

2019

Folia Linguistica

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The semantic range of ditransitive verbs in Modern English has been at the center of linguistic attention ever since the pioneering work of Pinker (1989. Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). At the same time, historical research on how the semantics of the ditransitive construction has changed over time has seriously lagged behind. In order to address this issue for the Germanic languages, the Indo-European subbranch to which Modern English belongs, we systematically investigate the narrowly defined semantic verb classes occurring in the ditransitive construction in Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic. On the basis of data handed down from Proto-Germanic and documented in the oldest layers of the three Germanic subbranches, East, West and North Germanic, respectively, we show that the constructional range of the ditransitive construction was considerably broader in the earlier historical stages than now; several subclasses of verbs that could instantiate the ditransitive in early Germanic are infelicitous in the ditransitive construction in, for instance, Modern English. Taking the oldest surviving evidence from Germanic as point of departure, we reconstruct the ditransitive construction for an earlier proto-stage, using the formalism of Construction Grammar and incorporating narrowly defined semantic verb classes and higher level conceptual domains. We thus reconstruct the internal structure of the ditransitive construction in Proto-Germanic, including different levels of schematicity.

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Section: The Syntactic Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic

Vázquez-González

Barðdal

2019

Folia Linguistica

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“…Compared to traditional CxG approaches, the allostructional approach assumes that the alternation does have independent status ( Zehentner, 2018 : 169). Even though this approach has increasingly been adopted in constructionist research ( Perek, 2012 , 2015 ; Zehentner, 2016 , 2018 ; De Vaere et al, 2018 , De Vaere et al, 2021 , Willems et al, 2019 ) many open questions remain. We will focus here on questions regarding the meaning side of the constructional sign, the details of which we turn to next.…”

Section: Alternating Constructions In Cxg and The Idea Of Allostructimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Cappelle, various other authors working within CxG have demonstrated the viability of the allostructional analysis by applying it to numerous other alternations, e.g. the dative alternation and the locative alternation in present-day English ( Perek, 2015 ), as well as the dative alternation in Middle English ( Zehentner, 2016 , 2018 ) and the ditransitive alternation in present-day German ( De Vaere et al, 2018 , De Vaere et al, 2021 , Willems et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Allostructions revisited

Vaere

Kolkmann

Belligh

2020

Journal of Pragmatics

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An important recent innovation in Construction Grammar (CxG) has been to assume the existence of a general underspecified construction underlying two or more alternating constructions, which themselves are considered to be formally and functionally related allostructions of the general construction. Despite this novel proposal, the meaning side of the general construction has either been neglected or couched in a single-layered view of meaning that does not adequately distinguish semantics from pragmatics. Building on state-of-the-art developments at the semantics-pragmatics interface, this article proposes an account whereby the distinction between the meaning of the general construction and the meaning of the allostructions aligns with the distinction between encoded (semantic) and inferred (pragmatic) meaning. We argue in favor of an allostructional account for two grammatical alternations which have previously been treated as an epiphenomenon of two underlying independent constructions: the German ditransitive alternation and the English genitive alternation. While demonstrating the fruitfulness of an allostructional analysis for these two new cases, we also provide critical observations about the wider applicability of allostructional analyses. In particular, we argue that an allostructional analysis proves to be trivial for Lambrechtian ‘allosentences’.

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“…Since its emergence in the 1970s [ 36 , 39 , 40 ], EGT has reached a level of maturity in the fields of mathematical biology and economics. As several authors have noted, however, this framework is also applicable to the modelling of language dynamics, if its ingredients are suitably interpreted [ 26 – 35 ]. In general, it is possible to equate strategies with linguistic variants, i.e.…”

Section: Evolutionary Games and Language Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A number of applications of evolutionary game-theoretic (EGT) modelling are now available in the literature on language dynamics [ 26 – 35 ]. These will be briefly discussed in § 2 in order to contextualize the contribution of the present paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Replicator–mutator dynamics of linguistic convergence and divergence

Kauhanen

2020

R. Soc. open sci.

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People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity maintenance as an evolutionary game in which individuals play the field and the dynamics are supplied by a multi-population extension of the replicator–mutator equation. Using linearization, the stabilities of all dynamic equilibria of the game in its fully symmetric two-population special case are found. The model is then applied to an empirical test case from adolescent sociolinguistic behaviour. It is found that the empirically attested population state corresponds to one of a number of stable equilibria of the game under an independently plausible value of a parameter controlling the rate of linguistic mutations. An asymmetric three-population extension of the game, explored with numerical solution methods, furthermore predicts to which specific equilibrium the system converges.

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Ditransitives in Middle English: on semantic specialisation and the rise of the dative alternation

Cited by 45 publications

References 41 publications

Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic

Reconstructing the ditransitive construction for Proto-Germanic: Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic

Allostructions revisited

Replicator–mutator dynamics of linguistic convergence and divergence

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