Measuring the alternation strength of causative verbs
A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interaction between verb,
theme and construction
This paper presents a method for quantitative and qualitative analyses of the
causative alternation in English, where verbs may alternate between a transitive
(causative) construction (Santa crinkled his eyes) and an
intransitive (non-causative) construction (His eyes
crinkled). [1] 1 The aim of this
paper is to present a method designed to measure the alternation strength of
causative verbs, i.e. the extent to which they alternate between the two
constructions. One of the central elements this paper investigates is the Theme,
i.e. the participant that is in subject position in the intransitive
construction and object position in the transitive construction. A distinctive
collostructional analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004) shows that certain
verbs are significantly attracted to one of either two constructions while
others are equivalently distributed in the two constructions. However, after
careful analysis it appears that very few Themes actually overlap between the
two constructions (Lemmens
forthcoming) which indicates that each construction seems to be
rather restrictive regarding which Themes they recruit. The low degree of
alternation of the Themes leads us to ask ourselves the extent to which the
alternation is part of a speaker’s knowledge of their language.
Article outline
- 1.Alternation, constructions and inheritance links
- 2.Corpus and coding
- 2.1Data collection and coding
- 2.2Methodology: Distinctive collostructional analysis, Theme overlap and distributional semantics
- 3.Quantitative and qualitative analysis
- 3.1Verb-oriented perspective: Distinctive collostructional analysis
- 3.2Theme-oriented perspective: Theme overlap
- 3.2.1Measuring Theme Overlap
- 3.2.2Using distributional semantics to group Themes semantically
- 4.Discussion of the method: Case study of freeze
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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