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Article published In:
Current trends in analyzing syntactic variation
Edited by Ludovic De Cuypere, Clara Vanderschueren and Gert de Sutter
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 31] 2017
► pp. 219–242

Measuring the alternation strength of causative verbs

A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interaction between verb, theme and construction

| Université de Lille |
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).
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
Published online: 23 April 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00009.rom
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Heidinger, Steffen
2019. Reflexive and unmarked anticausatives in French and Spanish: Frequency of transitive use and undergoer overlap. Langages N° 216:4 ► pp. 53 ff. DOI logo
Lemmens, Maarten
2019. In defense of frequency generalizations and usage-based linguistics. An answer to Frederick Newmeyer’s “Conversational corpora : when big is beautiful”. CogniTextes 19:Volume 19 DOI logo

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