Alternating constructions with ditransitivegebenin present-day German

Abstract

Abstract This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation of the verbgebenin two alternating ditransitive constructions in present-day German with theRecipienteither coded in the dative case (the indirect object construction, abbreviated: IOC) or by means of the PPan+ accusative case (the prepositional object construction, POC). The study is based on a quantitative analysis ofN=1,301 sentences (712 IOC and 589 POC) drawn from theDeutsche Referenzkorpus(IDS, Mannheim) which were annotated for 20 factors. Using a logistic regression analysis, we found evidence for the effect of 10 predictors (bootstrapped C-index=95%). We discuss our results in comparison to corpus-based research of the English dative alternation and point to some notable differences between both languages. In German, POC appears to be strongly correlated with collectiverecipients, collectiveagents, passive voice, and concrete and propositional transfer senses of the main verbgeben. With regard to the semantics ofgeben, we argue that the quantitative findings are best accounted for on the basis of a general underspecified verb meaning ‘gebentransfer’ that does not yet differentiate between the three possible verb senses (concrete, abstract, and propositional).

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