Chapter 3
The role of verb polysemy in constructional profiling
A cross-linguistic study of give in the
dative alternation
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.
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
-
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Glynn, Dylan & Olaf Mikkelsen
2024.
Concrete constructions or messy mangroves? How modelling contextual effects on constructional alternations reflect theoretical assumptions of language structure.
Linguistics Vanguard 10:s1
► pp. 9 ff.
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