A multivariate analysis of the Old English ACC+DAT double object alternation
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Ludovic De Cuypere
Dr. Ludovic De Cuypere obtained his PhD in Germanic Languages and Literature at Ghent University in 2007. He currently works as part time assistant and postdoctoral researcher at the Linguistics Department of Ghent University, where his statistical duties include teaching statistical courses and providing statistical consultancy. His current research focuses on alternating syntactic constructions.
Abstract
In Old English, the ditransitive construction with an accusative (direct) object and a dative (indirect) object occurred with two alternating object orders: ACC-DAT vs. DAT-ACC. This study examines the motivations behind the OE speakers’ choice for one of both orders. The effect of 16 factors was evaluated based on a corpus sample of N = 2409 sentences drawn from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). The data was analysed by means of a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis. The results indicate that the ACC+DAT alternation was largely driven by the same factors that motivate the dative alternation in later stages of British English. However, no evidence was found for specific verb preferences in Old English, which suggests that the OE object alternation was less driven by semantics than the dative alternation in PDE. It is argued that the results further substantiate Wolk et al.’s (2012) claim that the cognitive mechanisms underlying present-day probabilistic patterns also underlie past variation.
About the author
Dr. Ludovic De Cuypere obtained his PhD in Germanic Languages and Literature at Ghent University in 2007. He currently works as part time assistant and postdoctoral researcher at the Linguistics Department of Ghent University, where his statistical duties include teaching statistical courses and providing statistical consultancy. His current research focuses on alternating syntactic constructions.
©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
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- A multivariate analysis of the Old English ACC+DAT double object alternation
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- Book Reviews
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- Gilquin, Gaëtanelle, Sylvie De Cock, and Sylviane Granger: Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A multivariate analysis of the Old English ACC+DAT double object alternation
- The good, the not good, and the not beautiful: On the non-obligatoriness of suppression following negation
- On the ‘holistic’ nature of formulaic language
- Establishing criteria for RST-based discourse segmentation and annotation for texts in Basque
- Book Reviews
- Giltrow, Janet and Dieter Stein: Genres in the Internet
- Pace-Sigge, Michael: Lexical priming in spoken English usage
- Gilquin, Gaëtanelle, Sylvie De Cock, and Sylviane Granger: Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage
- Resource Note
- C-ORAL-JAPON: Corpus of Spontaneous Spoken Japanese
