Chapter 3
Aspects of description: ditransitive verbs in language use
This chapter provides a corpus-based description of individual ditransitive verbs in actual language use. First, the two verbs that are typical of ditransitivity in ICE-GB will be analysed: give and tell (see section 3.1). Second, the four habitual ditransitive verbs in ICE-GB (i.e. ask, show, send and offer) will be scrutinised (see section 3.2). Particular emphasis in all the analyses will be placed on the different kinds of routines that are involved in the use of ditransitive verbs. The description of peripheral ditransitive verbs, on the other hand, will centre on the concepts of grammatical institutionalisation and conventionalisation (see section 3.3). At the end of this chapter, the two aspects will be discussed in a wider setting in the assessment of the role of linguistic routine and creativity in the use of ditransitive verbs (see section 3.4).
3.1 Typical ditransitive verbs in ICE-GB
In the present study, typical ditransitive verbs are verbs which are frequently attested in ICE-GB in general (i.e. > 700 occurrences) and which are associated with an explicit ditransitive syntax in some 50% of all occurrences or more (cf. Figure 2.4, p. 84). These standards are met by give (see section 3.1.1) and tell (see section 3.1.2).
3.1.1 GIVE
In light of recent psycholinguistic and cognitive-linguistic evidence, it is not sur- prising that the most frequent ditransitive verb in ICE-GB is GIVE.1 Experiment- al data have led Ninio (1999), for example, to put forward the hypothesis that children initially acquire constructions through one (or very few) ‘pathbreaking verbs(s)’. For the ditransitive construction, it stands to reason that GIVE, on grounds of its semantics, could be one of the pathbreaking verbs.2 Furthermore, the very prototypicality of GIVE may well be the reason why this verb is the most
1 From now on, the abstract lemma will be given in capital letters, while actual word-forms of the lemma will be given in lower case and in italics. 2 Note, however, that Campbell and Tomasello (2001) find that children may also start using the double-object construction with less prototypical verbs, which might be due to the input provided by their parents. The issue of prototypicality will be discussed in more detail in section 4.2.1. Aspects of Description 93 frequent verb in the basic ditransitive pattern both in many children’s and in many adults’ language use (cf. Campbell and Tomasello, 2001: 258f.). As a matter of fact, GIVE is used not only in the basic ditransitive pattern, but in a variety of syntactic patterns. It is the range of these patterns and their frequencies in ICE-GB that will be discussed first (see section 3.1.1.1). In a second step, I will turn to significant principles and factors that are responsible for the selection of one specific pattern in given contexts (see section 3.1.1.2).
3.1.1.1 Structure and frequency of GIVE-patterns
In the basic ditransitive pattern, all three semantic roles (i.e. acting entity, affected entity and transferred entity) are ‘explicitised’ at the surface-structure level (as subject, indirect object and direct object respectively).3 What is more, all clause elements are realised as noun phrases. Examples (20) to (22) are instantiations of the basic ditransitive pattern, which I refer to as the type-I pattern of GIVE.4
(20) and then you can give everyone a runtime version of it
The subject may at times not be part of the type-I pattern, for example in imperatives and in occurrences of GIVE that are embedded in to-infinitives or ing-clauses. This is the case in examples (23) to (25).
(23) Give me a warning next time
If we allow for the general optionality of the grammatical subject in such cases, the type-I pattern can be described by using the formula in (26).5
3 I am taking over the technical term ‘explicitise’ from computer linguistics where it is used to refer to the formal realisation of (i.e. ‘making explicit’) an underlying process or phenomenon or implicit relationship (cf. Lonsdale et al., 2001). 4 It should be noted that the distinction of patterns here is much more fine-grained than, say, the traditional ‘clause patterns’, because, for example, each clause pattern (being defined on the basis of configurations of clause elements) covers a wide range of different realisations of a particular clause element (cf. Biber et al., 1999: 141). 5 Note that ‘(...)’ refers to optional clause elements and ‘[...]’ to obligatory clause elements.