Data from ‘The Dative Alternation Revisited: Fresh Insights from Contemporary British Spoken Data’

Abstract

The dataset covers the so-called “dative alternation”. The dative alternation (also referred to as the ditransitive or double-object construction) refers to parallel constructions that have broadly similar meaning but different syntax: i. “he gave it to the board” ii. “I gave her my old one” In i., the verb “give” takes a noun phrase (the pronoun “it”) and a prepositional phrase as arguments (“to the board”), while in ii. the verb takes two noun phrases (“her” and “my old one”) as arguments. In the dataset, we refer to i) as “VNPP” and ii) as “VNN”. We refer to the indirect object role as “recipient” (“her” in i. and “the board” in ii.) and the direct object as “theme” (“it” in i. and “my old one” in ii.). The dataset was collected from the Early-Access Subset (EAS) of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 [1] for use in a sociolinguistic study of competing linguistic constructions [2]. The corpus is now publicly available via CQPweb at https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014spoken. The dative alternation is a topic of active research in linguistics, but few studies have made datasets available. Meta-studies, creation of specialised NLP tools, and comparisons of results will benefit from better access to this dataset.