Revisiting Hudson’s (1992) OO = O2 hypothesis: A usage-based variationist approach to the English ditransitive construction
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
In an important paper on the English “double-object”, or ditransitive, construction, Richard Hudson proposes a hypothesis that conflates the ditransitive direct object, or O2, and the monotransitive direct object, or OO, into the same syntactic functional category. While making important departures from a number of unfortunate assumptions within mainstream formal theories of linguistics at the time, the OO = O2 hypothesis itself is problematic in the perspective of contemporary cognitive linguistics. This paper addresses the hypothesis from the perspective of usage-based construction grammar. Applying simple collexeme analysis and multifactorial heatmap analysis to instances of OOs and O2s in ICE-GB, this paper shows that the usage-patterns of both are far too complex, displaying cross-register variation, for the OO = O2 hypothesis to be tenable. The findings provide support for a usage-based variationist account in defining syntactic functional categories.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Journal of Linguistics |
Volume | 50 |
Issue number | 1 |
Pages (from-to) | 73-101 |
Number of pages | 28 |
ISSN | 0374-0463 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2 Jan 2018 |
- Faculty of Humanities - construction grammar, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, ditransitive, constructional variation, direct objects, usage-based grammar, usage-based linguistics, ICE-GB, language register, cognitive sociolinguistics
Research areas
ID: 164296047