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The locus of linguistic variation
  • ISSN 2211-6834
  • E-ISSN: 2211-6842
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Abstract

This paper investigates the structure of the dative alternation in dialects of Northwest British English. This includes theme passivization of apparent Double Object Constructions (). Detailed investigation shows that different dialects use distinct licensing strategies to derive the Theme passive structure. The main variety discussed is Liverpool English, where Theme passivisation is shown to derive from a prepositional dative with a null preposition. In contrast, Manchester English, a neighbouring variety, derives Theme passives of the Double Object Construction, via an Applicative configuration (Haddican 2010, Haddican and Holmberg 2012). The study shows that a range of syntactic properties and restrictions on a structure can be traced back to variation in the functional lexicon.

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2017-01-12
2024-10-13

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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): dialectal variation; Ditransitives; null preposition; parameters; syntactic variation

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