Lexical Fillers Influence the Dative Alternation: Estimating Constructional Saliency Using Web Document Frequencies

Abstract

We propose a new measure of constructional saliency for use with Web-data, which corrects for infrequent forms. The measure attempts to incorporate both collocational information as well as frequency of use for the whole construction. We report on results for a case study of the so-called dative alternation in English, and show that our measure of saliency indicates that not only do specific verbs have different preferences for the two forms of the alternation, as shown in previous research, but that there are also specific preferences with respect to the filler items. We interpret this as supporting the view that the dative alternation is governed by a rich web of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors.