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Acceptability of Dative Argument Structure in Spanish: Assessing Semantic and Usage-Based Factors
1Department of Psychology, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota.
Cognitive Science
|December 1, 2016
Summary
Spanish dative constructions are more acceptable when word combinations are frequent and conventional, not based on verb semantics. This highlights the importance of usage patterns in language acceptability.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Dative alternation, a grammatical phenomenon, is influenced by semantic, lexical, and usage-based factors across languages.
- Existing research often relies on semantic verb properties to explain dative construction acceptability.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the influence of fine-grained verb statistics and semantic properties on Spanish dative construction acceptability.
- To challenge traditional semantic-based explanations with corpus and experimental data.
Main Methods:
- Corpus analysis of Spanish verbs in dative constructions.
- Acceptability rating tasks with native Spanish speakers.
Main Results:
- Dative alternation in Spanish is not strictly tied to semantic verb classes, unlike in English.
- Highly entrenched word combinations and frequent word orders significantly increase dative construction acceptability.
- Verb semantics were found to be less influential than usage-based factors.
Conclusions:
- Spanish dative construction acceptability is primarily driven by usage-based factors, such as conventionalization and frequency.
- Findings support usage-based linguistic theories over purely semantic accounts for dative alternation.
- Language-specific patterns of use significantly shape grammatical acceptability.
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