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Part of
Give Constructions across Languages
Edited by Myriam Bouveret
[Constructional Approaches to Language 29] 2021
► pp. 75–96

Chapter 3
The role of verb polysemy in constructional profiling

A cross-linguistic study of give in the dative alternation

| Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

This study employs corpus-based quantitative methods to investigate the interaction between the semasiological structure (polysemy) of a single verb and the onomasiological (near-synonymous) structuring of the dative alternation in English and Polish. More precisely, the verbal category examined here is give in English and its equivalent in Polish. The primary objective is to examine the relationship between morpho-syntactic variation and lexical semantic variation. More specifically, the study addresses the importance of accounting for variation in lexical semantic structure while modeling morpho-syntactic structure. It is argued here that the polysemous nature of lexemes licensed by constructions has an impact on the choice of alternate constructions. In other words, some meanings of a given lexeme are likely to be more distinctly associated with one construction than the other. The empirical results obtained in the study for both English and Polish provide supporting evidence for this claim.

Keywords: dative alternation, give-verbs, semasiology, onomasiology, multivariate statistics, cross-linguistic, English, Polish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Dative alternation: Prior findings
    • 2.2Polysemy of give
  • 3.Study goals and hypotheses
  • 4. Method, data, and analysis
  • 5. Results and discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.29.03kra
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