In:Corpus-based Approaches to Construction Grammar
Edited by Jiyoung Yoon and Stefan Th. Gries
[Constructional Approaches to Language 19] 2016
► pp. 165–198
Sense-based and lexeme-based alternation biases in the Dutch dative alternation
Published online: 8 September 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.19.07ber
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.19.07ber
In semantic studies of argument structure alternations as well as in psycholinguistic
studies on syntactic priming, lexical alternation biases are typically measured
at the level of the verb lexeme. This study explores the hypothesis that the
proper locus of subcategorization probabilities is the verb sense. It investigates
the effects of lexical polysemy on the subcategorization probabilities of Dutch
dative alternating verbs as reflected in frequency data from natural language
corpora and from a priming experiment. A sense-based distinctive collexeme
analysis on the corpus data indicates that distinct senses of the same verb may
indeed display different alternation biases. The response patterns in our priming
experiment suggest that language users keep track of verb subcategorization
preferences at different levels of schematization.
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