Semantic and Pragmatic Motivations for Constructional Preferences

Abstract

A select group of transfer verbs can enter into four different constructions: the ditransitive construction ( He provided John the money), the prepositional-dative construction ( He provided the money to John), a construction with a prepositional theme ( He provided John with the money), and a construction with a recipient realized by a for-phrase ( He provided the money for John). In this article, the authors take a close look at three such verbs: provide, supply, and present. Corpus analysis shows that these three verbs display different structural preferences with respect to the for-, to-, and with-patterns. To explain these preferences, the study investigates pragmatic principles (following Mukherjee on provide) and the role played by semantic factors. An examination of the semantics of the verbs and the lexically motivated constructional semantics of the to, for, and with-patterns shows (a) that the three constructions are not interchangeable and (b) that the preferential differences among the three verbs find an explanation in the compatibility between lexical and constructional semantics. The description is mainly based on data from the British National Corpus.