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Part of
Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy
Edited by Naomi Shin and Daniel Erker
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 76] 2018
► pp. 157–188

Ditransitives and the English System of Degree of Control

A Columbia School analysis

| The City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY

The English System of Degree of Control (Diver, 1984) is a Columbia School hypothesis that posits invariant meanings for word order signals in what are traditionally called transitive and ditransitive sentences. In this paper, the Control System is shown to account for speakers’ choices between two constructions that seem, on introspection, to be equivalent: push the wall and give the wall a push. The Control meanings do not only describe a set of uses. Instead, by distinguishing between the linguistic system, on the one hand, and its use, on the other, the meanings of the Control System provide an explanation for the distribution of forms and the choices that speakers make in order to meet their communicative goals.

Keywords: ditransitive, English, Columbia School, Control System, grammar
Article outline
  • Ditransitives in Construction Grammar
  • Theoretical preliminaries: Columbia School linguistics
    • Signals and meanings
  • English System of Degree of Control
    • Phase I: Two-participant events
    • Phase II: Three-participant events
    • Comparing Phase I and Phase II
  • Data: Gave the wall a push
  • Data: Pushed the wall
  • Patterns of distribution
  • Other contextual factors
    • ‘Giving the book a read’ and other types of examples
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Data Sources
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.08ste
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