This thesis is a large-scale investigation of ditransitive constructions and their alternants
in English. Typically both constructions involve three participants: participant A
transfers an element B to participant C. A speaker can linguistically encode this type of
situation in one of two ways: by using either a double object construction or a
prepositional paraphrase. This study examines this syntactic choice in the British
component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), a fully tagged and parsed
corpus incorporating both spoken and written English.
After a general introduction, chapter 2 reviews the different grammatical
treatments of the constructions. Chapter 3 discusses whether indirect objects have to be
considered necessary complements or optional adjuncts of the verb. I then examine the
tension between rigid classification and authentic (corpus) data in order to demonstrate
that the distinction between complements and adjuncts evidences gradient
categorisation effects.
This study has both a linguistic and a methodological angle. The overall design
and methodology employed in this study are discussed in chapter 4. The thesis
considers a number of variables that help predict the occurrence of each pattern. The
evaluation of the variables, the determination of their significance, and the measurement
of their contribution to the model involve reliance on statistical methods (but not
statistical software packages).
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 review pragmatic factors claimed to influence a speaker’s
choice of construction, among them the information status and the syntactic ‘heaviness’
of the constituents involved. The explanatory power and coverage of these factors are
experimentally tested independently against the corpus data, in order to highlight
several features which only emerge after examining authentic sources.
Chapter 8 posits a novel method of bringing these factors together; the resulting
model predicts the dative alternation with almost 80% accuracy in ICE-GB.
Conclusions are offered in chapter 9