English Ditransitive Verbs

Aspects of Theory, Description and a Usage-based Model
Erscheinungsjahr 2005
ISBN: 978-90-420-1934-8
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 53, 295 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 644 g

Reihe: Language and Computers

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mukherjee, Joybrato

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Einzelne Sprachen & Sprachfamilien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
1 Ditransitive verbs in previous research and in the present work
2 Methodology
3 Aspects of description: ditransitive verbs in language use
4 Aspects of a usage-based model of ditransitive verbs
5 Summary and conclusion: corpus – co-selection – communicative competence
References cited
Appendix
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Joybrato Mukherjee holds the Chair of English linguistics at Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany). His research interests include applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, intonation, stylistics and syntax. He is the author of Form and Function of Parasyntactic Presentation Structures: A Corpus-based Study of Talk Units in Spoken English (Rodopi, 2001) and Korpuslinguistik und Englischunterricht: Eine Einführung (“Corpus Linguistics and English Language Teaching: An Introduction”; Peter Lang, 2002).