The English Dative Alternation

Author : Marie-Louise Häfner
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3656634580
Total Pages : 22 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English dative alternation written by Marie-Louise Häfner and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Most speakers of English are unconsciously proficient in combining all kinds of information in order to form the grammatical structure they use for language production. In this essay I attempt to describe one of these complex structures linguistically, namely the nature of dative verbs. Understanding the syntactic patterns of the verb is a challenging task – not only for the acquisition of English as a second language, but for linguistic research just as much. We're occupied with transitive verbs that take more than one internal argument.There is a great number of alternations in English grammar which do not involve a change in the transitivity of the verb (Levin 1993), one of them being the Dative Alternation, which will be the topic of this essay. I will begin by introducing some general findings of research in this field whereupon a list of verbs will follow which presents groups of verbs that do or do not perform the alternation. At the core of my dissertation I will compare two different approaches on the subject, namely the works of Manfred Krifka and Rappaport Hovav & Levin. They represent two sites of the debate concerning the semantics of the dative alternation. Whilst the former defends the so-called polysemy view, the latter are enthusiastic for the single meaning approach. I will go into more detail in section 4. In the final analysis I'm going to introduce a brief study of the dative alternation in different variants of English, namely British, Australian and American English.

Author : Mark J. van der Laan
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1441997822
Total Pages : 628 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Targeted Learning written by Mark J. van der Laan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-17 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The statistics profession is at a unique point in history. The need for valid statistical tools is greater than ever; data sets are massive, often measuring hundreds of thousands of measurements for a single subject. The field is ready to move towards clear objective benchmarks under which tools can be evaluated. Targeted learning allows (1) the full generalization and utilization of cross-validation as an estimator selection tool so that the subjective choices made by humans are now made by the machine, and (2) targeting the fitting of the probability distribution of the data toward the target parameter representing the scientific question of interest. This book is aimed at both statisticians and applied researchers interested in causal inference and general effect estimation for observational and experimental data. Part I is an accessible introduction to super learning and the targeted maximum likelihood estimator, including related concepts necessary to understand and apply these methods. Parts II-IX handle complex data structures and topics applied researchers will immediately recognize from their own research, including time-to-event outcomes, direct and indirect effects, positivity violations, case-control studies, censored data, longitudinal data, and genomic studies.

Author : Eva Zehentner
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 311063385X
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Competition in Language Change written by Eva Zehentner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses one of the most pervasive questions in historical linguistics – why variation becomes stable rather than being eliminated – by revisiting the so far neglected history of the English dative alternation. The alternation between a nominal and a prepositional ditransitive pattern (John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary) emerged in Middle English and is closely connected to broader changes at that time. Accordingly, the main quantitative investigation focuses on ditransitive patterns in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English; in addition, the book employs an Evolutionary Game Theory model. The results are approached from an ‘evolutionary construction grammar’ perspective, combining evolutionary thinking with diachronic constructionist notions, and the alternation’s emergence is interpreted as a story of constructional innovation, competition, cooperation and co-evolution. The book not only provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the history of one of the most-discussed syntactic phenomena in English, but by fusing two frameworks and employing two different methodologies also presents a highly innovative approach to a problem of relevance to historical linguistics in general.

Author : Susa Schnuck
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3656916357
Total Pages : 21 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English Dative Alternation written by Susa Schnuck and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik), course: Dative Alternation, language: English, abstract: Would you say you ‘...gave a stranger your phone number’ or does ‘...gave your phone number to a stranger’ sound better? In essence, this termpaper is trying to analyse this question. The grammatical phenomenon underlying which decribes those two constructions – the double object dative [a stranger] [your phone number] and the prepositional object dative [your phone number] [to a stranger] – is the so-called dative alternation. The term dative alternation has the ability to express the same event of giving with two specific structures, as shown above. The following paper will focus on the approaches of Krifka and Rappaport Hovav and Levin. At first, a definition of dative alternation will be given. Important facts, examples and a list of verbs, which allow or do not allow dative alternation, will be provided to give an overview of the topic. This term paper will also respond to the differences between the dative alternation and the benefactive alternation and will afterwards compare the two approaches on dative alternation. The main ideas of Krifka's “Semantic and Pragmatic Conditions for the Dative Alternation” (2003) and Rappaport Hovav's and Levin's “The English dative alternation: The case for verb sensitivity” (2008) will be presented and compared. Last but not least, I am going to introduce brief thoughts of dative alternation in the German language and how it is connected to the English dative alternation.

Author : Beth Levin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226475336
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book English Verb Classes and Alternations written by Beth Levin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-09 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning. The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory. Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.

Author : Miriam Butt
Publisher : Center for the Study of Language and Information Publica Tion
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Argument Realization written by Miriam Butt and published by Center for the Study of Language and Information Publica Tion. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents seven essays that survey fundamental argument realization issues within a typologically broad range of languages. The papers examine, within the architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), the variety of ways in which arguments of a predicate may be realized in the syntax. LFG allows for the complex interactions of arguments, syntactic positions and grammatical functions. Regardless of the complexity or simplicity of the predicational structure of a clause, the papers included show how the relationship between arguments and their overt realization can be dealt with. The papers also treat multiple case marking in Australian languages, possessor alternation in Welsh, directional complex predicates in American Indian languages and causatives in Japanese. They discuss representational issues that encompass underspecification and the encoding of semantic information needed to determine the correspondence of thematic arguments to their overt syntactic realization.

Author : Michelle Blum
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3346499774
Total Pages : 27 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dative Alternation. Investigating Grammatical Variation written by Michelle Blum and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Project Report from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: The phenomenon under investigation was the dative alternation, i.e. the factors influencing the choice between the NP/noun phrase dative ("I give him the book") and the PP/prepositional phrase dative ("I give the book to him"). It is generally assumed, that factors holding an influence over the dative choice are, among others, the syntactic complexity/length of the indirect object and the verbs used. In order to find out which factor is more influential in the choice, both factors were considered in the study. Some verbs, like give, promise, lend and mail, have a tendency towards the usage with the NP dative - that means that they would not be used with the PP dative, and this would thus mean that the NP dative would be used more often when these verbs occur - if the verb choice influences the dative form more than the syntactic complexity, that is.

Author : Pilar Guerrero Medina
Publisher : Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN 13 : 9781845537449
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Morphosyntactic Alternations in English written by Pilar Guerrero Medina and published by Equinox Publishing (UK). This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together fourteen papers which explore the discourse-pragmatic, semantic, morphological and syntactic factors involved in English morphosyntactic alternations. The contributors to this volume deal with different types of "diathesis alternations" --broadly defined by Levin (English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, 1993) as "alternations in the expressions of arguments, sometimes accompanied by changes of meaning" --i.e. transitivity alternations (such as the causative/inchoative alternation and the conative alternation), alternations involving arguments within the VP (such as the Swarm-alternation, and the dative or benefactive alternations), etc. The volume will also include some contributions dealing more generally with the issues of morphological relatedness and verb-specific alternations within functionalist, cognitive and/or constructionist frameworks. The book features a wide range of theoretical approaches, ranging from functionalist models such as Functional Discourse Grammar or the Cardiff Grammar version of Systemic Functional Linguistics to more cognitively-oriented approaches such as Goldberg's Construction Grammar or Fillmore's Frame Semantics. This attempt to describe morphosyntactic alternations within different contemporary theories¬¬ --derivational and non-derivational-- will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic phenomena traditionally subsumed under the rubric of morphosyntactic alternation. The book will be of interest to experienced linguists and researchers of a functionalist, cognitivist or even functional-typological persuasion.

Author : Miriam Fuehrer
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3640342240
Total Pages : 59 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dative Alternation in the Interlanguage of German Learners of English written by Miriam Fuehrer and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-06-07 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.0, University of Siegen, language: English, abstract: Would you say you ‘...gave a good friend a scarf’ or would you rather say you ‘...gave a scarf to a good friend’? The grammatical phenomenon underlying the two syntactic variants – the double object dative [a good friend] [a scarf] and the prepositional object dative [a scarf] [to a good friend] – is the so-called 'dative alternation' (DA). The latter term captures this general ability in English to express the same event of giving with two distinct syntactic structures. DA has been researched extensively for native speakers of English. Most of the scientific attention was directed at identifying the semantic and informational variables that give rise to the respective variants. Also, a number of corpus studies have revealed an interesting phenomenon commonly referred to as “lexical bias” (e.g. Wasow 2002). More precisely, researchers have found some dative verbs to occur more frequently in a prepositional dative variant (POD), whereas other dative verbs seem to favor the double object variant (DOD) (e.g. Davidse 1996; Stallings et al. 1998; Wasow 2002; Arnoldet al. 2003; Bresnan & Nikitina 2003). For example, Wasow (2002) found 'give' to occur in a DOD shape in 85% of his data, while Davidse (1996) found the verb 'throw' to occur in a POD shape in 90% of her data. While DA has been widely explored for native speakers of English, relatively little is known about it in contexts of SLA. This study investigates how DA is reflected in the IL of German learners of English and, additionally, whether German learners exhibit similar lexical biases in their choice of dative syntax. Raw data of early research on the acquisition of English DA by French native speakers (Mazurkevich 1984; Hawkins 1987) show similar lexical biases as observed for native speakers. This trend suggests that lexical biases are acquired by L2 learners of English. The latter is tested empirically in the present paper by means of a questionnaire study with 33 German-speaking learners of English. 16 American undergraduate students of the University of Montana serve as a control group. The data obtained from the experiment show a significant influence of verbal lexis on dative argument choice (p

Author : Patrick Hanks
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262312867
Total Pages : 479 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lexical Analysis written by Patrick Hanks and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-01-25 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach to meaning in language that distinguishes between patterns of normal use and creative exploitations of norms. In Lexical Analysis, Patrick Hanks offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. The book fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, Hanks writes, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. Hanks offers a new theory of language, the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of carefully chosen citations from corpora and other texts, he shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. His goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage and that shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.