This book presents the first major study of ditransitives in Swedish. Using a combination of well-established and innovative corpus-based methods, the book reveals considerable changes in the constructional behaviour of ditransitive verbs over the course of the last 200 years. The key finding is that the use of the so-called double object construction has decreased dramatically in terms of frequency, lexical richness and semantic range. This development is parallelled by a decisive increase in prepositional object constructions. The results are of high relevance to the ongoing debate within construction grammar on constructional productivity and on the nature of horizontal links.
Fredrik Valdeson has a doctoral degree from Stockholm University and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Södertörn University. His research is mainly focused on syntactic change in Swedish within the framework of construction grammar.
Acknowledgements List of Tables List of Figures
1
Introduction 1.1 Aims and Outline
1.2 Terminology
1.3 Language Change in Swedish
2
Ditransitive Verbs and Constructions 2.1 Ditransitives Typologically
2.2 Ditransitives in Swedish and Other Germanic Languages
2.3 Summary
3
Theory 3.1 Theoretical Framework
3.2 Theoretical Accounts of Ditransitive Constructions
3.3 Conclusion of Chapters 1–3 and the Way Ahead
4
Data 4.1 A Note on the Time Frame 1800–2016
4.2 The Corpora
4.3 Method of Data Collection
4.4 Summary
5
Research Questions and Methods 5.1 Research Questions
5.2 Methods
5.3 Summary
6
The Double Object Construction 6.1 Overall Frequency Results
6.2 Lexical Richness
6.3 Semantic Analysis
6.4 Collexeme Analyses
6.5 Summary and Conclusions
7
The DOC and the POC s 7.1 Overall Frequency Results
7.2 Semantic Analysis
7.3 Distinctive-Collexeme Analyses
7.4 Summary and Conclusions
8
Verb-Specific and Verb-Class-Specific Constructions 8.1 Introduction
8.2 Verbs of Transfer
8.3 Verbs of Creation and Obtaining
8.4 Verbs of Communication
8.5 Summary and Conclusions
9
Discussion 9.1 Introduction
9.2 A Semantic Map Account of the
DOC and the
POC S
9.3 Allatives, Datives and Benefactives
9.4 A Constructional Network Analysis
9.5 Type Frequency, Schematicity and Semantic Coherence
9.6 Comparison with Other Germanic Languages
9.7 Conclusion
10
Summary
Appendix1: Complete Verb Lists of the DOC Appendix2: Complete Verb Lists of the POC s References Index
The book will be of interest to specialists in construction grammar or Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, as well as typologists and anyone with a cross-linguistic interest in ditransitives.