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The present book offers fresh insights into the description of ditransitive verbs and their complementation in present-day English. In the theory-oriented first part, a pluralist framework is developed on the basis of previous research that integrates ditransitive verbs as lexical items with both the entirety of their complementation patterns and the cognitive and semantic aspects of ditransitivity. This approach is combined with modern corpus-linguistic methodology in the present study, which draws on an exhaustive semi-automatic analysis of all patterns of ditransitive verbs in the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) and also takes into account selected data from the British National Corpus (BNC). In the second part of the study, the complementation of ditransitive verbs (e.g. give, send) is analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Special emphasis is placed here on the identification of significant principles of pattern selection, i.e. factors that lead language users to prefer specific patterns over other patterns in given contexts (e.g. weight, focus, pattern flow in text, lexical constraints). In the last part, some general aspects of a network-like, usage-based model of ditransitive verbs, their patterns and the relevant principles of pattern selection are sketched out, thus bridging the gap between the performance-related description of language use and a competence-related model of language cognition.
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Acknowledgements There are many people from whose help and comments I have benefitted considerably. First and foremost, I would like to thank Jürgen Esser for his advice throughout the project and his support way beyond the call of duty, without which this book would never have materialised. To him this book is dedicated. I would also like to thank Manfred Kohrt, Winfried Lenders, Karl Reichl and Klaus Peter Schneider who read earlier drafts of the manuscript and provided me with detailed feedback. For comments and discussions on individual examples and analyses, arguments and conclusions, I am grateful to Bas Aarts, Jan Aarts, the late Ruth Brend, Sylviane Granger, Sebastian Hoffmann, Rolf Kreyer, Geoffrey Leech, Jacqueline Monschau and the audiences at various conferences, in particular at the LACUS Forum 2001 in Montreal and the ICAME Conference 2002 in Gothenburg. Special thanks are due to my native-speaker informants Anne Barron, Rosemary Bock, Shalini Gupta, Sach Mukherjee and Sally Schmiesing. I would also like to express my thanks to the series editors for including this book in Language and Computers. Christian Mair in particular gave me invaluable advice at various stages of the editorial process. The proof-reading of the final version of the manuscript was taken over by Rosemary Bock, for which I am most grateful. Naturally, I remain responsible for all remaining blunders and infelicities. Finally, I owe an extreme debt of gratitude to my wife, Nicole, for her unfailing support and love.
Chapter 1 Ditransitive verbs in previous research and in the present work In spite of the vast literature that ditransitive verbs have spawned, linguists still do not unanimously agree on what ditransitive verbs are. Even the viability and scope of the concept of ditransitivity in general are a matter of dispute. Presumably this is why there are so many different models for the description of ditransitivity. Thus, an overview of various existing models is an appropriate starting-point for the present study. 1.1
Aims of the present study
The differences between existing models of ditransitivity can be systematised according to various dimensions. For instance, some linguistic approaches to ditransitivity are inherently lexical and focus on lexical features of ditransitive verbs (e.g. in terms of valencies as in valency theory, see section 1.2.3), while other