A Diachronic Study of Structure Patterns of Ditransitive Verbs

摘要

This paper mainly studies English dative alternation from a diachronic point of view. As a verb of caused-possession, the typical ditransitive verb give is contrasted with send and tell in respect of their different structural biases diachronically (12th-19th centuries). We built dynamic, syn-diachronic structural models, and made contrastive observations on structural biases of the verbs. The verb give shows a strong tendency to occur in the double object construction, send has a structural bias towards the prepositional object construction and tell shows preference for the clausal complement diachronically, which suggests the determining role of lexical semantics of the verb in its structural preference and the meaning of syntactic structures in which the verb occurs.