Startseite Linguistik & Semiotik Introduction: what are alternations and how should we study them?
Artikel
Lizenziert
Nicht lizenziert Erfordert eine Authentifizierung

Introduction: what are alternations and how should we study them?

  • Dirk Pijpops ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Karlien Franco ORCID logo , Dirk Speelman ORCID logo und Freek Van de Velde ORCID logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 18. Januar 2024

Abstract

The research paradigm of alternation studies is forming an increasingly large share of the empirical foundations of usage-based linguistics. As the paradigm is essentially an amalgamation of research traditions from various subfields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and construction grammar, it sports various definitions of the concept of “alternation” and various ways of conducting an alternation study, which are not always compatible. The present special issue is therefore intended to bring researchers from various backgrounds in usage-based linguistics together to see how we can deal with these issues. This introduction first presents the various ways of defining an alternation and discusses the differences between them and how these definitions determine the methodological set-up of an alternation study. Next, the contributions to the special issue are each in turn summarized and related to one another.


Corresponding author: Dirk Pijpops, CLiPS, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium, E-mail:

References

Aaron, Jessi. 2010. Pushing the envelope: Looking beyond the variable context. Language Variation and Change 3. 191–222. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394509990226.Suche in Google Scholar

Arppe, Antti, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Dylan Glynn, Martin Hilpert & Arne Zeschel. 2010. Cognitive corpus linguistics: Five points of debate on current theory and methodology. Corpora 5(1). 1–27. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2010.0001.Suche in Google Scholar

Bloem, Jelke, Arjen Versloot & Fred Weerman. 2015. An agent-based model of a historical word order change. In Robert Berwick, Anna Korhonen, Alessandro Lenci, Thierry Poibeau & Aline Villavicencio (eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, 22–27. Lisbon: Association for Computational Linguistics.10.18653/v1/W15-2404Suche in Google Scholar

Bresnan, Joan, Cueni Anna, Tatiana Nikitina & Rolf Harald Baayen. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In Gerolf Bouma, Irene Krämer & Joost Zwarts (eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation, 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.Suche in Google Scholar

Brook, Marisa. 2018. Taking it up a level: Copy-raising and cascaded tiers of morphosyntactic change. Language Variation and Change 30. 231–260. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394518000078.Suche in Google Scholar

Bürkle, Daniel. 2015. The acquisition of sentence alternations: How children understand and use the English dative alternation. Canterbury: University of Canterbury PhD thesis.Suche in Google Scholar

Cheshire, Jenny. 1987. Syntactic variation, the linguistic variable, and sociolinguistic theory. Linguistics 25(2). 257–282. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1987.25.2.257.Suche in Google Scholar

Colleman, Timothy. 2009. Verb disposition in argument structure alternations: A corpus study of the dative alternation in Dutch. Language Sciences 31(5). 593–611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2008.01.001.Suche in Google Scholar

Colleman, Timothy. 2020. The emergence of the dative alternation in Dutch: Towards the establishment of a horizontal link. In Chiara Fedriani & Maria Napoli (eds.), The diachrony of ditransitives, 137–168. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110701371-005Suche in Google Scholar

Davies, Mark. 2016. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW). Available at: https://www.english-corpora.org/now/.Suche in Google Scholar

De Cuypere, Ludovic. 2015. A multivariate analysis of the Old English ACC plus DAT double object alternation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 11(2). 225–254. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2014-0011.Suche in Google Scholar

den Boon, Ton & Dirk Geeraerts (eds.). 2005. Van Dale Groot woordenboek van de Nederlandse taal, 14th edn. Antwerpen/Utrecht: Van Dale Lexicography.Suche in Google Scholar

De Smet, Hendrik, Frauke D’hoedt, Lauren L. Fonteyn & Kristel Van Goethem. 2018. The changing functions of competing forms: Attraction and differentiation. Cognitive Linguistics 29(2). 197–234. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2016-0025.Suche in Google Scholar

Engel, Alexandra & Adriana Hanulíková. 2020. Speaking style modulates morphosyntactic expectations in young and older adults: Evidence from a sentence repetition task. Discourse Processes 57(9). 749–769. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2020.1777497.Suche in Google Scholar

Ferreira, Victor & Elizabeth Schotter. 2013. Do verb bias effects on sentence production reflect sensitivity to comprehension or production factors? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 66(8). 1548–1571. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2012.753924.Suche in Google Scholar

Grafmiller, Jason. 2014. Variation in English genitives across modality and genres. English Language and Linguistics 18(3). 471–496. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674314000136.Suche in Google Scholar

Grafmiller, Jason & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2018. Mapping out particle placement in Englishes around the world: A study in comparative sociolinguistic analysis. Language Variation and Change 30(3). 385–412. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394518000170.Suche in Google Scholar

Gries, Stefan Thomas. 2003. Multifactorial analysis in corpus linguistics: A study of particle placement. New York: Continuum.Suche in Google Scholar

Grieve, Jack. 2016. Regional variation in written American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139506137Suche in Google Scholar

Grondelaers, Stefan, Dirk Speelman, Denis Drieghe, Marc Brysbaert & Dirk Geeraerts. 2009. Introducing a new entity into discourse: Comprehension and production evidence for the status of Dutch er ‘there’ as a higher-level expectancy monitor. Acta Psychologica 130(2). 153–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.11.003.Suche in Google Scholar

Heller, Benedikt. 2018. Stability and fluidity in syntactic variation world-wide: The genitive alternation across varieties of English. Leuven: University of Leuven PhD dissertation.Suche in Google Scholar

Heller, Benedikt, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Jason Grafmiller. 2017. Stability and fluidity in syntactic variation world-wide. Journal of English Linguistics 45(1). 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424216685405.Suche in Google Scholar

Klavan, Jane & Dagmar Divjak. 2016. The cognitive plausibility of statistical classification models: Comparing textual and behavioral evidence. Folia Linguistica 50(2). 355–384. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2016-0014.Suche in Google Scholar

Lavandera, Beatriz. 1978. Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society 7(2). 171–182. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500005510.Suche in Google Scholar

Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to do linguistics with R: Data exploration and statistical analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.195Suche in Google Scholar

Levshina, Natalia. 2018. Anybody (at) home? Communicative efficiency knocking on the construction grammar door. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 6. 71–90. https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2018-0004.Suche in Google Scholar

Levshina, Natalia & Kris Heylen. 2014. A radically data-driven construction grammar: Experiments with Dutch causative constructions. In Ronny Boogaart, Timothy Colleman & Gijsbert Rutten (eds.), Extending the scope of construction grammar, 17–46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110366273.17Suche in Google Scholar

Mikkelsen, Olaf & Dylan Glynn. 2023. Schemas, chunks and everything between: Evidence from Germanic and Romance. Paper presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC), Düsseldorf, 9 August.Suche in Google Scholar

Oostdijk, Nelleke, Martin Reynaert, Véronique Hoste & Ineke Schuurman. 2013. The construction of a 500-million-word reference corpus of contemporary written Dutch. In Peter Spyns & Jan Odijk (eds.), Essential speech and language technology for Dutch, theory and applications of natural language processing, 219–247. Heidelberg: Springer.10.1007/978-3-642-30910-6_13Suche in Google Scholar

Pericchi, Natalia, Kristin Davidse, Bert Cornillie & Freek Van de Velde. 2020. A diachronic study of indirect object doubling in Argentinian Spanish. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 52(1). 45–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/03740463.2020.1744874.Suche in Google Scholar

Perek, Florent. 2012. Alternation-based generalizations are stored in the mental grammar: Evidence from a sorting task experiment. Cognitive Linguistics 23(3). 601–635. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2012-0018.Suche in Google Scholar

Perek, Florent. 2015. Argument structure in usage-based construction grammar: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/cal.17Suche in Google Scholar

Pijpops, Dirk. 2019. How, why and where does argument structure vary? A usage-based investigation into the Dutch transitive-prepositional alternation. Leuven: University of Leuven PhD dissertation.Suche in Google Scholar

Pijpops, Dirk. 2020. What is an alternation? Six answers. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34. 283–294. https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00053.pij.Suche in Google Scholar

Pijpops, Dirk. 2022. Lectal contamination: Evidence from corpora and from agent-based simulation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27(3). 259–290. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20040.pij.Suche in Google Scholar

Pijpops, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Stefan Grondelaers & Freek Van de Velde. 2018. Comparing explanations for the Complexity Principle: Evidence from argument realization. Language and Cognition 10(3). 514–543. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2018.13.Suche in Google Scholar

Pijpops, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Stefan Grondelaers & Freek Van de Velde. 2021. Incorporating the multi-level nature of the constructicon into hypothesis testing. Cognitive Linguistics 32(3). 487–528. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2020-0039.Suche in Google Scholar

Romain, Laurence, Dagmar Hanzlikova, Petar Milin & Dagmar Divjak. In press. Ruled by construal? Framing article choice in English. Constructions and Frames. https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/ruled-by-construal-framing-article-choice-in-english#:∼:text=In%20cognitive%20linguistics%2C%20grammatical%20structure,the%20speaker%20construes%20this%20context.Suche in Google Scholar

Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive variation in English: Conceptual factors in synchronic and diachronic studies. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110899818Suche in Google Scholar

Röthlisberger, Melanie. 2018a. Regional variation in probabilistic grammars: A multifactorial study of the English dative alternation. Leuven: University of Leuven PhD dissertation.Suche in Google Scholar

Röthlisberger, Melanie. 2018b. Guidelines for the dative alternation. Unpublished manuscript, KU Leuven. Available at: https://melanie-roethlisberger.ch/data/.Suche in Google Scholar

Schapper, Antoinette. 2014. Kamang. In Antoinette Schapper (ed.), The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar, vol. 1: Sketch grammars (Pacific Linguistics 644), 285–350. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9781614515241.285Suche in Google Scholar

Soares da Silva, Augusto, Susana Afonso, Dafne Palú & Karlien Franco. 2021. Null se constructions in Brazilian and European Portuguese: Morphosyntactic deletion or emergence of new constructions? Cognitive Linguistics 32(1). 159–193. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2019-0037.Suche in Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. The great regression: Genitive variability in Late Modern English news texts. In Kersti Börjars, David Denison & Alan K. Scott (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 59–88. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/la.199.03szmSuche in Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Douglas Biber, Jesse Egbert & Karlien Franco. 2016. Toward more accountability: Modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English. Language Variation and Change 28(1). 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394515000198.Suche in Google Scholar

Theijssen, Daphne. 2012. Making choices: Modelling the English dative alternation. Nijmegen: Radboud University PhD dissertation.Suche in Google Scholar

De Vaere, Hilde, Ludovic De Cuypere & Klaas Willems. 2021. Alternating constructions with ditransitive geben in present-day German. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 17(1). 73–107. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2017-0072.Suche in Google Scholar

Van de Velde, Freek, Hendrik De Smet & Lobke Ghesquière. 2013. On multiple source constructions in language change. Studies in Language 37(3). 473–489. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.37.3.01int.Suche in Google Scholar

Willems, Annelore & Gert De Sutter. 2015. Reassessing the effect of the complexity principle on PP placement in Dutch. Nederlandse Taalkunde 20(3). 339–366.10.5117/NEDTAA2015.3.WILLSuche in Google Scholar

Wolk, Christoph, Joan Bresnan, Anette Rosenbach & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. 2013. Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: Exploring cross-constructional variation and change. Diachronica 30(3). 382–419. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.30.3.04wol.Suche in Google Scholar

Zehentner, Eva. 2019. Competition in language change: The rise of the English dative alternation. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110633856Suche in Google Scholar

Received: 2023-11-10
Accepted: 2023-11-17
Published Online: 2024-01-18

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 11.1.2026 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0165/pdf
Button zum nach oben scrollen