The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, April 8, with a talk by Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Stanford). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled On the Rise of the Dative and Benefactive Alternations in English: The Intertwining of Differentiation with Attraction, and the abstract is as follows:
The rise of the ‘dative’ alternation (e.g. She gave her neighbor birthday presents ~ She gave birthday presents to her neighbor) has been shown to develop in later Middle English, around 1400 (Zehentner 2018). Building on Zehentner and Traugott (Forthcoming), I outline the rise of the benefactive alternation (e.g. build her a house ~ build a house for her) after 1600 from a historical constructionalist perspective and compare it with the rise of the dative alternation. My focus is on what evidence these developments provide for De Smet et al.’s (2018) discussion of attraction and differentiation. De Smet et al. propose that when functionally similar constructions come to overlap analogical attraction may occur. So may differentiation, but this process involves attraction to other subnetworks and is both “accidental” and “exceptional”. I show that in the histories of the dative and benefactive alternations functionally similar constructions come to overlap, and differentiation from each other plays as large a role as attraction to each other. Both attraction and differentiation occur at different levels: the verb and its distribution, the alternation subtype, and the larger system. Differentiation plays a considerably more significant role than De Smet et al. propose.