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The intertwining of differentiation and attraction as exemplified by the history of recipient transfer and benefactive alternations

  • Elizabeth Closs Traugott EMAIL logo
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

De Smet et al. (2018) propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap, analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I argue that differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. allow. My case study is the development of the dative and benefactive alternations. The rise of the dative alternation (e.g., “gave the Saxons land” ∼ “gave land to the Saxons”) has been shown to occur in later Middle English between 1400 and 1500 (Zehentner 2018). Building on Zehentner and Traugott (2020), the rise of the benefactive alternation (e.g., “build her a house” ∼ “build a house for her”) in Early Modern English c1650 is analyzed from a historical constructionalist perspective and compared with the rise of the dative alternation. The histories of the alternations exemplify the rise of functionally similar constructions that overlap, and show that differentiation from each other plays as large a role as attraction. Both attraction and differentiation occur at several levels of abstraction: verb-specific constructions, schemas and larger systemic changes.


Corresponding author: Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to Eva Zehentner for invaluable discussion of the issues and for her generous sharing of benefactive data. Thanks also to participants in the Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium at the University of California, Berkeley, April 2019, for their helpful remarks and to three anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions.

Corpora and data bases
ARCHER

A representative corpus of historical English registers, version X. 1990-1993/2002/2007/2010/2013/2016. http://www.manchester.ac.uk/archer

BNC

British national corpus, 1980-1990, version 3 (BNC XML edn.). 2007. 100 million words collected 1980s-early 1990s. Distributed by Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

CLMET

The corpus of late Modern English texts, compiled by Hendrik de Smet. https://perswww.kuleuven.be/∼u0044428/clmet.htm (accessed June -October 2019).

COCA

Corpus of contemporary American English. 1990–2017. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ (accessed May 4th 2020).

COHA

Corpus of historical American English. 1810–2009. Compiled by Mark Davies. Brigham Young University. https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/ (accessed May 4th 2020).

DOEC

Dictionary of Old English corpus. 2009. Compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey, Joan Holland, Ian McDougall & David McDougall, with Xin Xiang. University of Toronto. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/DOEC/index.html (accessed June 2019).

EEBO

Early English Books online. 1475 to 1700. Corpus created as part of the Text Creation Partnership. https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/ (accessed May 4th 2020).

Old English aerobics glossary. http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net (accessed May 4th 2020).

PPCEME

The Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Early Modern English, first edn., release 3. Compiled by Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini & Lauren Delfs. 2004. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche/ppche-release-2016/PPCEME-RELEASE-3.

PPCME2

The Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Middle English, second edn., release 4. Compiled by Anthony Kroch & Ann Taylor. 2000. www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html.

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Published Online: 2020-08-04
Published in Print: 2020-11-26

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