Accounting for Variability in the Linearization of Ditransitive Constructions in English among Native Speakers.

In order to account for the variability in the linearization of ditransitive constructions in English, semantic and syntactic as well as pragmatic motives have been proposed. Of recent, gradience grammar has been proposed (cf. Bresnan & Ford 2010), whereby categorical semantic constraints have been discounted and probabilistic tendencies advanced. While the current study subscribes to all those criteria, it intends to focus on two auxiliary properties that have so far not received enough attention as regards their role in the variability in the linearization of ditransitive constructions, namely diachronic factors and analogical leveling. This complementary account will thus fill up the lacuna posed by the fact that despite the role of the multifactorial predictors advanced so far, these do not fully answer, for example, the question as to why some speakers or speech communities accept, while others reject, constructions in which these very predictors are at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]