TY - JOUR
T1 - Corpus evidence of the viability of statistical preemption
AU - Goldberg, Adele E.
N1 - Funding Information:
* I am grateful to Lisa Goldman for checking the COCA corpus data I collected in order to re-move misclassified instances of the dative or ditransitive. I would also like to thank Anatol Stefanowitsch for graciously sharing his paper and his data set with me, and Graeme Trous-dale, Thomas Hoffmann, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft. I am grateful to Laura Suttle and Devin Casenhiser for helpful discussions. Finally, I owe Mark Davies a special debt of gratitude for making large and easily searchable corpora such as COCA available for free. The research was supported by NSF grant # 0613227. Email <adele@ princeton.edu>
PY - 2011/2
Y1 - 2011/2
N2 - The present paper argues that there is ample corpus evidence of statistical preemption for learners to make use of. In the case of argument structure constructions, a verbi is preempted from appearing in a construction A, CxA, if and only if the following probability is high: P(CxB|context that would be suitable for CxA and verbi ). For example, the probability of hearing a preemptive construction, given a context that would otherwise be well-suited for the ditransitive is high for verbs like explain that overwhelmingly appear in the dative, and low for verbs like tell that readily appear in the ditransitive. Strength of statistical preemption is determined both by this probability, and by the frequency (ln (F)) of a verb in a preemptive construction when the context is at least as well suited to the preempted construction. The critiques of preemption by Stefanowitsch (2008, this volume) are countered by arguing that the relevant probabilities were not considered. Moreover, we find evidence that constructions are somewhat less constrained when yoked to non-alternating verbs, as Stefanowitsch (cf. this volume) suggests should be the case.
AB - The present paper argues that there is ample corpus evidence of statistical preemption for learners to make use of. In the case of argument structure constructions, a verbi is preempted from appearing in a construction A, CxA, if and only if the following probability is high: P(CxB|context that would be suitable for CxA and verbi ). For example, the probability of hearing a preemptive construction, given a context that would otherwise be well-suited for the ditransitive is high for verbs like explain that overwhelmingly appear in the dative, and low for verbs like tell that readily appear in the ditransitive. Strength of statistical preemption is determined both by this probability, and by the frequency (ln (F)) of a verb in a preemptive construction when the context is at least as well suited to the preempted construction. The critiques of preemption by Stefanowitsch (2008, this volume) are countered by arguing that the relevant probabilities were not considered. Moreover, we find evidence that constructions are somewhat less constrained when yoked to non-alternating verbs, as Stefanowitsch (cf. this volume) suggests should be the case.
KW - Construction learning
KW - Dative
KW - Ditransitive
KW - Statistical preemption
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U2 - 10.1515/COGL.2011.006
DO - 10.1515/COGL.2011.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:80051638728
SN - 0936-5907
VL - 22
SP - 131
EP - 153
JO - Cognitive Linguistics
JF - Cognitive Linguistics
IS - 1
ER -