The emergence of the English dative alternation as a response to system-wide changes

Abstract

This chapter revisits the much-discussed question whether a causal relationship holds between several changes observed in the history of English; these are (a) the increasing use of prepositional patterns, (b) the loss of nominal case marking, and (c) the fixation of constituent order. Located within the same time-period, namely Middle English, there is relatively broad consensus that the processes are correlated. However, the extent and directionality of causation is highly debated. This chapter addresses this issue by taking another look at a specific case study which reflects all the changes: the history of the dative alternation. To add to results from earlier corpus-based investigations on this development, the emergence of the alternation is modelled by means of Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT). Specifically, the study tests the hypothesis that the increase of prepositional ditransitives and ultimately the dative alternation is a consequence of case marking being lost and constituent order becoming fixed, and discusses the potential benefits of taking an EGT approach to such questions.