Ditransitives in British English Dialects

Johanna Gerwin

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110373585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What determines whether we say She gave him a book instead of She gave a book to him? The author views this 'dative alternation' as a sociolinguistic variable and explores its distribution across different British English dialects, registers and time frames. It thereby offers a novel, language-external explanation of the choice of one construction over the other and sheds new light on British dialect syntax.

1 Introduction

1.1 Speaker choice, ditransitives, and the sociolinguistic variable

People speak because they want to express meaning. However, language provides ample options for expressing one and the same meaning. Speakers can choose which variant they use in a particular speech situation. One of the tasks of linguists is to reconstruct this choice and explain the motivation that has led to a specific utterance.

There are several ways of approaching this task. It is possible to focus on a particular utterance, assess the potential alternatives to this utterance and then formulate a hypothesis as to why a particular meaning is expressed in this and not in another way. When the hypothesis can frequently be confirmed in similar contexts, one can speak of a principle which seems to be followed by many speakers for functional reasons. Maybe the chosen utterance is easier to formulate for the speaker, easier to process for the hearer or, in general terms, more functional than other available alternatives equivalent in meaning.

The study of ditransitives provides a case in point. The label 'ditransitives' refers to grammatical constructions¹ involving a verb followed by an indirect object and a direct object. The verb is 'ditransitive' (or 'trivalent') in that it typically occurs with two arguments in its complementation pattern. The direct object expresses the entity undergoing the action denoted by the verb. The semantic role of such objects is called 'theme' (sometimes also called 'patient' (cf. e.g. Thompson 1995)). The indirect object expresses the semantic roles 'recipient' or 'beneficiary' of the verbal action.

In English, there are two syntactic frames or positional variants by means of which a ditransitive relation can be expressed: the double object construction (hf. also DOC) in (1) and a prepositional construction (hf. also PREP) in (2).

(1)	a.	Jim gave Lucy the book. (DOC)
	b.	Jim bought Lucy the book.
(2)	a.	Jim gave the book to Lucy. (PREP)
	b.	Jim bought a book for Lucy.

In DOC, the indirect object precedes the direct object. In PREP, the verb is followed by the direct object, and the semantic role of recipient or beneficiary is realised by a prepositional phrase, either involving to (in the case of recipient²), or for (in the case of beneficiary). Given that the same semantic roles are realised by DOC and PREP, the two constructions can be seen as synonymous, i.e. as expressing the same meaning. The two constructions are therefore said to 'alternate', i.e. the ditransitive verbs allow their arguments to appear in two different syntagms. The alternation of DOC with a to-phrase construction has traditionally been called 'dative alternation'; the alternation of DOC with a for-phrase construction 'benefactive alternation' (cf. e.g. Levin 1993: 45 ff.). The scope of ditransitives is further defined in 1.2 below.

Ditransitives provide a situation in which there are two (conventionalised) ways of expressing one and the same meaning. The question thus arises what determines the choice of one over the other construction in discourse. A considerable number of suggestions have been put forward. They concern the type of verb used in the construction, the types of objects, or the specific speech situation in which a ditransitive is uttered. These suggestions are reviewed in detail in Chapter 2. They generally refer to 'language-internal' factors, i.e. influencing factors found in the utterance itself or in the immediate context of the utterance. If, for example, a certain verb occurs more readily with either DOC or PREP, the choice of construction is ascribed to the particular verb used. Often, the principles suggested to govern the dative/benefactive alternation have been based on opinion: a principle has been formulated based on an assessment of what 'is possible' or 'sounds better' according to the intuition(s) of the linguist or a group of informants. This has changed in recent years, and linguists have used language corpora to collect more instances of ditransitives and to substantiate their hypotheses with larger amounts of data. While this has led to a more objective approach in explaining the dative/benefactive alternation, it has also complicated the task of defining ditransitives, as corpus linguists are also forced to deal with less typical instances of the ditransitive construction that turn up in their corpus data. Which ditransitives this study includes and how it deals with atypical (or 'difficult') ditransitives is addressed in Chapter 3.

Another way of approaching the question of choice in language is to focus on the speaker, i.e. not on the product but on the producer of speech. After all, it is the speaker who makes a choice (even if certain functional factors inherent in language may influence him or her in this choice). The sociolinguistic paradigm has set out to explain the motivation of choices by reference to the speaker and to his or her social or regional background. According to sociolinguists, speakers say something in a certain way because they are members of the middle class (or want to be), or because they live in a certain region and intend to show their regional affiliation, for example. In this way, correlations can be established between the shape of a linguistic item and 'language-external' factors pertaining to the speaker. The most obvious choice a speaker tends to face is the one between a standard variant, learned at school or transmitted through the media³, and a non-standard variant used by family and friends. Labov (1966) has suggested that language can be divided into two opposing systems: 'overt norms', carried by the prestige (or standard) variety that are shared by and, in fact, define the speech community, and 'covert norms' that govern the use of non-standard variants (cf. Cheshire 1987: 257f.). This dichotomy has resulted in a theoretical tool: the '(socio-) linguistic variable'. The variable is meant to capture "two ways of saying the same thing" (Labov 1972: 271), where 'one way' is the standard or prestige variant and 'the other way' is one or more covert prestige and non-standard variants that express the same conceptual meaning but carry additional social meaning. Figure 1 illustrates the principle of the sociolinguistic variable.

Figure 1: The sociolinguistic variable

A typical sociolinguistic variable is one involving different phonological realisations, one or several of which carry some social meaning. For example, Trudgill's study of the alternation between [n] or [Ŋ] as the final consonant in multi-syllable words like singing or reading (cf. Chambers & Trudgill ²1998: 57ff.) in Norwich, England yielded the result "that there is a clear relationship between usage of this variable and social class membership: the (ng)-2 /n/ variant is much more typical of working-class speech" (Chambers & Trudgill ²1998: 58). The correlation is established by means of quantification of the variants. The more frequently a variant is used in a particular social context, the stronger the correlation. The sociolinguistic variable has traditionally been applied to phonological (or morphophonemic) phenomena such as in the given example. However, the concept has long been extended to syntactic variation as well⁴.

Ditransitives have generally not been on the agenda of sociolinguistic study. This is because the alternation between the two constructions is present in the standard language. Neither variant (DOC or PREP) can easily be ascribed an overtly or covertly prestigious social meaning. Since both variants are used in the standard (as well as in non-standard varieties), the reasons for a particular choice were sought language-internally. However, this approach overlooks the factors of diachronic, stylistic, and regional variation in ditransitives. While it is obvious that both variants exist in standard and nonstandard English alike, it is still possible that preferences concerning the choice of a ditransitive variant change over time. Alternatively, one could say that the functional or language-internal factors influencing the choice of construction are subject to change. Furthermore, the use of ditransitives might be influenced by the register a speaker uses. One variant might be preferred in more formal contexts (represented by written language), whereas another would perhaps be used more frequently in less formal contexts (as is typical of spoken language). The patterns of ditransitive usage in spoken versus written registers (also diachronically) is looked at in Chapter 4.

Another language-external motivation for the use of a specific ditransitive variant might lie in the factor 'region', which refers to a speaker's geographic base, the place s/he is associated with. One regional phenomenon concerning ditransitives, long observed by dialectologists, is the use of ditransitives in which the two objects are personal pronouns. When both objects are pronouns, a third dialectal variant of object encoding becomes available alongside the standard variants DOC as in (3) and PREP as in (4) below. This variant has been termed the 'alternative double object construction' (altDOC) and is exemplified in (5).

(3)	Give me it! (DOC)
(4)	Give it to me! (PREP)
(5)	Give it me! (altDOC)

The alternative double object construction features the same order of semantic roles as the prepositional construction, but like the double object construction it lacks a preposition. The alternative double object construction is considered 'non-standard', because it is (at least traditionally) assumed to be restricted to certain dialects. Thus, in the case of two pronoun objects, the notion of a 'ditransitive variable' has already been instantiated. This is illustrated in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2: Sociolinguistic variable with pronominal ditransitives

The present work takes this idea further and postulates that the dative/benefactive alternation may also be treated as a sociolinguistic variable (cf. also Bresnan & Hay 2008: 247). The variants, i.e. the double object construction and the prepositional construction, are assumed to be subject to sociolinguistic (including dialectal) variation, even though both variants are also an inherent part of the standard language. The variation between DOC and PREP is not assumed to be categorical. Rather, preferences in DOC and PREP may be reflected by differences in the frequencies at which the variants are attested in different regions and registers. According to Mukherjee and Hoffmann (2006: 6) "[…] verb-complementation [as e.g. by a double object or prepositional pattern] is one of the structural features at the lexis-grammar interface that are significant in shaping local lexicogrammatical norms in varieties of English".

As Figure 2 shows, the dialectal variant altDOC represents a different encoding of the objects than the standard variants. The present work therefore also looks at alternative ditransitive patterns (alternative DOC and alternative PREP) in order to establish the extent to which they may function as regional variants. In the case of alternative orderings, there may be categorical differences between the standard and different regional varieties. Certain orderings may be possible in one region but not in another.

The notion of the sociolinguistic variable is applied to ditransitives in Figure 3. The labels for the variants of the ditransitive variable (DOC, PREP, altDOC, and altPREP) refer to the ordering of the indirect object (O_ind) and the direct object (O_dir) following the verb.

Figure 3: Ditransitives as a sociolinguistic variable

Chapter 5 deals with the regional distribution of the ditransitive variants and their diachronic development in the relevant regions. Chapter 6 deals in detail with pronominal ditransitives, the variable depicted in Figure 3. Since pronouns behave somewhat exceptionally in ditransitives, a separate chapter is devoted to these types of ditransitives.

The study outlined above is mainly based on data from two spoken corpora, the Freiburg English...