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.
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
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References