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Article published In: Current trends in analyzing syntactic variation:
Edited by Ludovic De Cuypere, Clara Vanderschueren and Gert de Sutter
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 31] 2017
► pp. 219–242

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Measuring the alternation strength of causative verbs

A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interaction between verb, theme and construction

 | Université de Lille |
Published online: 23 April 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00009.rom
Abstract
This paper presents a method for quantitative and qualitative analyses of the causative alternation in English, where verbs may alternate between a transitive (causative) construction (Santa crinkled his eyes) and an intransitive (non-causative) construction (His eyes crinkled).
The aim of this paper is to present a method designed to measure the alternation strength of causative verbs, i.e. the extent to which they alternate between the two constructions. One of the central elements this paper investigates is the Theme, i.e. the participant that is in subject position in the intransitive construction and object position in the transitive construction. A distinctive collostructional analysis (Gries, S. Th., and A. Stefanowitsch. 2004. “Extending Collostructional Analysis. A Corpus-Based Perspective on ‘Alternations’.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 91: 97–129. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) shows that certain verbs are significantly attracted to one of either two constructions while others are equivalently distributed in the two constructions. However, after careful analysis it appears that very few Themes actually overlap between the two constructions (. Forthcoming. Usage-Based Perspectives on Lexical and Constructional Semantics. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.) which indicates that each construction seems to be rather restrictive regarding which Themes they recruit. The low degree of alternation of the Themes leads us to ask ourselves the extent to which the alternation is part of a speaker’s knowledge of their language.
Article outline
  • 1.Alternation, constructions and inheritance links
  • 2.Corpus and coding
    • 2.1Data collection and coding
    • 2.2Methodology: Distinctive collostructional analysis, Theme overlap and distributional semantics
  • 3.Quantitative and qualitative analysis
    • 3.1Verb-oriented perspective: Distinctive collostructional analysis
    • 3.2Theme-oriented perspective: Theme overlap
      • 3.2.1Measuring Theme Overlap
      • 3.2.2Using distributional semantics to group Themes semantically
  • 4.Discussion of the method: Case study of freeze
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (22)
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Romain, Laurence
2025. Contingency and prototypicality. Pedagogical Linguistics DOI logo
Heidinger, Steffen
2019. Reflexive and unmarked anticausatives in French and Spanish: Frequency of transitive use and undergoer overlap. Langages N° 216:4 ► pp. 53 ff. DOI logo
Lemmens, Maarten
2019. In defense of frequency generalizations and usage-based linguistics. An answer to Frederick Newmeyer’s “Conversational corpora : when big is beautiful”. CogniTextes 19:Volume 19 DOI logo

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