ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a quantitative study of the English dative alternation. In any given situation, a speaker has a choice of two constructions: V-NP-NP (Give me the money), or V-NP-PP (Give the money to me), raising the question of why one pattern may be preferred over another. Although this is a well-researched topic, previous studies have drawn mainly on introspection and written data. Using unscripted spoken text opens new perspectives, especially as the linguistic data in BNC2014 is complemented by a wide range of sociolinguistic metadata on participating speakers. The study’s goal was to identify factors influencing a speaker’s preference of pattern, through an analysis of six high-frequency verbs. State-of-the-art multivariate statistical techniques were used in order to account for the interplay of the many potentially significant variables. At the level of linguistic analysis, results are broadly in line with those of earlier studies. However, some novel sociolinguistic effects were detected, notably in terms of speakers’ gender.
