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Ditransitives in Germanic Languages: Synchronic and diachronic aspects
Edited by Eva Zehentner, Melanie Röthlisberger and Timothy Colleman
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 7] 2023
► pp. 195–225

Dialectal ditransitive patterns in British English

Weighing sociolinguistic factors against language-internal constraints

The present study weighs the effect of well-established language-internal factors of the dative alternation such as animacy or pronominality of the object phrases against language-external factors such as origin of the speaker. For that purpose, the study samples three types of dative variants (N = 7,070) from six regional dialects in the UK, namely the canonical prepositional and double object constructions as well as the alternative double object construction (e.g. Give it me), using the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED) and the British National Corpus (BNC). By applying a novel dialectometric approach that uses conditional random forests, we compare the importance of well-known predictors across these six regions and highlight two (political) clusters that contrast England with Wales. Our study advances current knowledge on regional variation in probabilistic grammars and highlights the importance of including non-canonical variable patterns in the analysis.

Keywords: British English dialects, dative alternation, regional differences, dialectometry, alternative double object construction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The data
  • 3.Predictors in the ditransitive/benefactive alternation
    • 3.1Verb sense
    • 3.2Length and weight ratio
    • 3.3Pronominality
    • 3.4Recipient animacy
    • 3.5Presence / absence of other words
    • 3.6Region and corpus
  • 4.Method: Conditional random forest models
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The aggregate perspective
    • 5.2Zooming in on regional variation
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.7.06ger
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