Dialectal ditransitive patterns in British English

Abstract

The present study weighs the effect of well-established language-internal factors of the dative alternation such as animacy or pronominality of the object phrases against language-external factors such as origin of the speaker. For that purpose, the study samples three types of dative variants (N = 7,070) from six regional dialects in the UK, namely the canonical prepositional and double object constructions as well as the alternative double object construction (e.g. Give it me), using the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED) and the British National Corpus (BNC). By applying a novel dialectometric approach that uses conditional random forests, we compare the importance of well-known predictors across these six regions and highlight two (political) clusters that contrast England with Wales. Our study advances current knowledge on regional variation in probabilistic grammars and highlights the importance of including non-canonical variable patterns in the analysis.