Ditransitive Verbs and the Ditransitive Construction: A Diachronic Perspective

Abstract

Ditransitive verbs and the ditransitive construction. A diachronic perspective TIMOTHY COLLEMAN This paper argues for the adoption of a construction-based perspective to the investigation of diachronic shifts in valency, which is a hitherto largely neglected topic in the framework Introduction 1Whereas valency grammar has been a thriving research area for about half a century and continues to be so-especially, but not exclusively, in Germanic linguistics-it has also been a predominantly synchronic enterprise. Existing work in historical valency usually takes the form of a synchronic investigation of the valency behaviour of selected lexical items in a single older language stage, more often than not with a view to the compilation of a valency dictionary for that particular period in the history of the language (see, e.g., Greule's 1999 valency dictionary of Old High German and Maxwell's 1982 valency grammar of Middle High German). Studies with a truly diachronic focus, i.e. investigations of the ins and outs of valency change have been scarce. Echoing a concern voiced by Ágel (2000, 269), Habermann (2007, 85) states that "what is lacking, is a theory of valency dynamics and shifts." Similarly, Heringer (2006Heringer ( , 1456 observes that valency research has not as yet succeeded in providing an accurate account of diachronic valency change: in his view, existing studies in this domain are limited to the macro level and lack real explanatory power. 2 The present paper will argue that the development of a theory of valency change may benefit in important ways from the incorporation of insights from construction-based theories of argument structure.To make this argument, I will draw on data on the (recent) semantic evolution of the double object argument structure constructions of English and Dutch, focussing on shifts which have taken place in the course of the last three or four centuries. The paper is structured as follows. First, section 2 briefly elaborates on the limited corpus of existing studies on diachronic valency and section 3 further sets the stage with a number of introductory remarks on the emerging field of diachronic construction grammar. In section 4, we move on to the data analysis, which will start out from an exploration of the semantic range of the English double object argument structure construction at the beginning of Late Modern English and a 1 The author is associated with the Linguistics Department at Ghent University. I would like to thank the organisers of and the other participants in the Hamburg workshop on 'Valency vs. argument structure' for their comments and suggestions. Bernard De Clerck is to be thanked for allowing the use of corpus data which were collected as part of a previous, joint investigation. My research into the diachrony of argument structure semantics is funded by a BOF grant from Ghent University (Special Research Fund, 'Variation and change in constructional semantics'). Author's address: timothy.colleman@UGent.be 2 "Alles in allem ist es der Valenzforschung ...

Recent change in the productivity and schematicity of theway-construction: A distributional semantic analysis

“…Besides, neither Israel nor Traugott & Trousdale report frequency information (either in terms of tokens or types), and while their qualitative analysis of citations from the OED for the former, and examples from diachronic corpora for the latter, is certainly useful to identify grammatical and broad distributional properties of the early construction, the data they report can hardly be claimed to exhaustively represent its earlier usage. Corpus-based studies of this kind have been conducted on several constructions in English and other languages (Barðdal 2008;Colleman 2011;Colleman & De Clerck 2011;Noël 2008;Noël & Colleman 2010), but so far not on the way-construction. No large-scale corpus-based study of change in the way-construction (and recent change in particular) has been undertaken to this day, and this paper seeks to mend at least this gap.…”

For a radically usage-based diachronic construction grammar

“…So as to categorize this thread of research a bit further, one could list it under the heading of "diachronic constructional semasiology", a term from Colleman and De Clerck (2011), which covers studies of the evolution of the meaning of constructions, usually accompanied by increased schematicity or, conversely, specificity. Other work that could be listed here includes Barðdal (2007Barðdal ( , 2011, Noël and Colleman (2010), Colleman (2011), Peng (2013Peng ( , 2016 and David (2015).…”

Stylistics, Literary Criticism, Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

“…The study of language is from either a diachronic perspective or synchronic, with each method having its own significance (Colleman, Röthlisberger & Zehentner, 2017). A diachronic study compares the characteristics of two languages or more throughout the evolution of time at different lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic levels.…”