who gives what to whom, and how do we know
if you can’t distinguish between who’s the giver and who’s the recipient, because case marking is gone – does sticking a preposition on one of them help, or does fixing word order do the trick? looking at the history of giving verbs in English will tell
What role do ambiguities between participant roles in an event play as a driving factor in language change? This paper addresses this question based on the specific case of the historical emergence of the well-known English dative alternation: In early English, the alternation between a nominal construction (They gave the students cake) and a prepositional construction (They gave cake to the students) was not present yet, as only the former was used. The latter became more widely available from Middle English onwards, and is firmly established today, with the choice between the constructions typically influenced by semantic and information-structural factors. The causes for this rise, and the subsequent establishment of the alternation relationship are contended – while often linked to language contact with French, another popular explanation is the loss of morphological case marking, which is argued to have made distinguishing between ‘recipient’ and ‘theme’ in ditransitive clauses difficult. In such a situation of potential overlap, strategies with greater disambiguation powers, such as prepositional marking on one argument, may propagate quickly. This paper takes disambiguation issues as its starting point, but argues against recipients and themes as the main focus, instead looking at subjects (agents) as a point of conflict.
Specifically, I suggest that disambiguation between recipients and themes likely did not present much trouble, based on the prototypical distributional properties of these arguments: while recipients tend to be animate, given, accessible, pronominal, definite, etc., themes usually have very different features, e.g. being low on the animacy scale. However, there is great overlap between recipients and agents regarding these aspects; at a time when constituent ordering was still relatively free, and SVO order was not predominant in the language, ambiguities may have given prepositional patterns formally distinguishing one of them an advantage. I test this hypothesis by means of a quantitative analysis of ditransitive tokens in a corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), coding the tokens on a variety of variables including features of the arguments, as well as case marking salience and aspects of constituent ordering. A behavioural profile/ multiple correspondence analysis demonstrates that while subjects and recipients clearly cluster together and contrast with themes; at the same time, however, a clear effect of subject-related factors on the choice between constructions is only partly confirmed by mixed-effects logistic regression modelling of the data. The results lend support to the idea that loss of specific formal disambiguation strategies is ‘compensated’ by an increase in other strategies if semantic cues are not sufficient; at the same time, the study showcases the complex interplay of different strategies (such as prepositional marking and constituent order), making it difficult to disentangle their individual impact.
Specifically, I suggest that disambiguation between recipients and themes likely did not present much trouble, based on the prototypical distributional properties of these arguments: while recipients tend to be animate, given, accessible, pronominal, definite, etc., themes usually have very different features, e.g. being low on the animacy scale. However, there is great overlap between recipients and agents regarding these aspects; at a time when constituent ordering was still relatively free, and SVO order was not predominant in the language, ambiguities may have given prepositional patterns formally distinguishing one of them an advantage. I test this hypothesis by means of a quantitative analysis of ditransitive tokens in a corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), coding the tokens on a variety of variables including features of the arguments, as well as case marking salience and aspects of constituent ordering. A behavioural profile/ multiple correspondence analysis demonstrates that while subjects and recipients clearly cluster together and contrast with themes; at the same time, however, a clear effect of subject-related factors on the choice between constructions is only partly confirmed by mixed-effects logistic regression modelling of the data. The results lend support to the idea that loss of specific formal disambiguation strategies is ‘compensated’ by an increase in other strategies if semantic cues are not sufficient; at the same time, the study showcases the complex interplay of different strategies (such as prepositional marking and constituent order), making it difficult to disentangle their individual impact.
how do we know who does what to whom in a clause? typical strategies for disambiguating include case, agreement, constituent order, or prepositions. if none of these work, asymmetries in e.g. animacy may help: subject = usually animate vs object = inanimate#linguistweets #lt0900