Competing constructions construct complementary niches

IF 0.5 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Language Dynamics and Change Pub Date : 2022-08-17 DOI:10.1163/22105832-bja10021

Eva Zehentner

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper traces the history of the English dative alternation by means of a quantitative analysis of instances of both the nominal and the prepositional construction in a corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), and compares the results to Wolk et al.’s (2013) data set from ARCHER. I show that the factors impacting the choice of one pattern over the other are subject to change over time: construction choice in Middle English is not straightforwardly predictable by the same factors at play in today’s alternation, but a clearer division based on syntactic semantic-pragmatic variables gradually emerges in the course to Late Modern English. I interpret this development as a prime case of competition, with a focus on (a) the initial emergence of functional overlap and thus competition, and (b) the subsequent creation of “functional niches” of the competing constructions.

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竞争性结构构建互补的壁龛

本文通过对中古英语语料库(PPCME2)中名义和介词结构实例的定量分析，追溯了英语与格交替的历史，并将结果与Wolk等人(2013)来自ARCHER的数据集进行了比较。我表明，影响一种模式选择的因素会随着时间的推移而发生变化:中古英语的结构选择并不是由今天的交替中起作用的相同因素直接预测的，但在晚期现代英语的过程中，基于句法、语义和语用变量的更清晰的划分逐渐出现。我将这一发展解释为竞争的主要案例，重点关注(a)最初出现的功能重叠和竞争，以及(b)随后竞争建筑的“功能利基”的创建。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Language Dynamics and Change LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS-

CiteScore

2.30

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Language Dynamics and Change (LDC) is an international peer-reviewed journal that covers both new and traditional aspects of the study of language change. Work on any language or language family is welcomed, as long as it bears on topics that are also of theoretical interest. A particular focus is on new developments in the field arising from the accumulation of extensive databases of dialect variation and typological distributions, spoken corpora, parallel texts, and comparative lexicons, which allow for the application of new types of quantitative approaches to diachronic linguistics. Moreover, the journal will serve as an outlet for increasingly important interdisciplinary work on such topics as the evolution of language, archaeology and linguistics (‘archaeolinguistics’), human genetic and linguistic prehistory, and the computational modeling of language dynamics.