Syntactic variation and lexical preference in the dative-shift alternation
Hans Martin Lehmann, Gerold Schneider · 2012
In this paper we investigate the dative shift alternation on the basis of 580 million words annotated with a dependency parser. We explore the link between lexical and syntactic choice in a core case of syntactic variation. We show that the sheer amount of automatically parsed data permits new approaches toward studying not only lexis but also other language internal factors influencing the syntactic choice offered by the dative shift alternation. Our approach offers new possibilities by replacing intuition-based decisions inherent to traditional variationist methodology with decisions based on observation.