ERIC Number: EJ1479909
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-2630-0672
EISSN: EISSN-2672-9431
Available Date: 0000-00-00
The Ditransitive Construction of the Synonyms 'Give', 'Offer', and 'Provide': A Corpus-Based Study of Twenty English Varieties
Kanokwan Phongpanya; Natcha Khamhaengrit; Atikhom Thienthong
LEARN Journal: Language Education and Acquisition Research Network, v18 n2 p893-918 2025
While synonymy has been extensively studied, few studies have examined the ditransitive construction of synonyms across English varieties. Informed by construction grammar viewing pattern-meaning combinations as constructions and using a 1.9-billion-word corpus of texts from 20 countries, this article analyzes four different ways of expressing ditransitivity by the synonyms "give," "offer," and "provide," which share the core sense of 'giving'. This analysis enables the exploration of syntactic variation between standard and variant patterns across 20 English varieties. The results show that the double-object pattern (e.g., "give me a book") is preferred over its prepositional variants (e.g., "give a book to me"); while this pattern is standard for "give" and "offer," it is not true of "provide." As regards the varieties, ditransitive patterns are similar across the synonyms, except "provide" which alternates frequently among four syntactic variants across the varieties. The cluster analyses also show that, despite belonging to the same concentric circle, the varieties differ in the ditransitive patterns of the synonyms. Overall, the results demonstrate that semantic similarity tends to contribute more to syntactic frames than regional factors. This article offers several implications for teaching synonymy and ditransitivity from constructional and World Englishes perspectives.
Descriptors: Language Variation, Semantics, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Language Patterns, Grammar, Computational Linguistics, Foreign Countries, Contrastive Linguistics, Syntax, Form Classes (Languages), Verbs, Standard Spoken Usage
Language Institute of Thammasat University. The Prachan Campus, 2 Prachan Road, Bangkok 10200 Thailand. e-mail: learnjournal@gmail.com; Web site: https://www.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/learn
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A

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