Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

70 A. Stefanowitsch
that negative corpus evidence can be adduced for a pet case of syntactic
theorizing (note that among the significantly absent collexemes of the
ditransitive complementation pattern in Table 5, there are a large
number of famously non-ditransitive verbs, e. g., suggest, provide, say,
describe, etc.).
One may now argue that even if such negative corpus evidence can be
obtained, it does not add any insights that could not also be arrived at
by introspective acceptability judgments at best (e. g., for say, explain,
whisper), it will confirm what we know from intuition anyway, in the
worst case it will never yield enough data to decide the issue (e. g., oxidise)
or contradict generally agreed-upon acceptability judgments (e. g.,
donate). There are two reasons why this argument is wrong: first, unlike
acceptability judgments, negative corpus evidence meets the standards of
scientific research. Second, it is only such corpus evidence that will allow
us to make principled statements about what is and is not possible: if we
hypothesize, based on acceptability judgments, that whisper ditransitive
is impossible, a single counterexample can prove this wrong. While
such counterexamples may not occur even in very large corpora, they
are still easy to come by in the age of the Internet. A web search quickly
turns up counterexamples produced by native speakers of (British) English,
both with clausal and, more crucially, with nominal objects:
(2) a. ... when I first beheld you the instinct of Nature whispered me
that we were in some degree related ... (Jane Austen, Love and
Friendship, Letter 11)
b. She had not been allowed to ... to bury the two people she had
loved most in the world ... to whisper them a last goodbye. (Meg
Hutchinson, Peppercorn Woman)
Of course, these examples can in turn be questioned; they may reflect
older stages of the language (Jane Austen wrote Love and Friendship
around 1790), they may reflect regional dialects (Meg Hutchinson lives
in Staffordshire), etc. However, the fact remains that we have objective
authentic examples pitched against subjective intuition. In contrast, the
negative corpus evidence obtained from the BNC gives us an objective
basis for arguing that, even though utterances like (2) can occur, they
are very marginal. This allows us to uphold the useful generalization
that communication verbs can be used with ditransitive syntax if they
refer to the type of message communicated, but not if they refer to the
manner in which it is communicated (Pinker 1989), even though we have
to reformulate it as a strong statistical tendency instead of a categorical
constraint. The same holds for donate. Even if we generously admit both
(1a and 1b) as counterexamples, we can still point out that donate would