Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

76 A. Stefanowitsch
gauntlet to local schools, saying ‘achieve your target increases in walking and cycling
by summer 2005, and we will donate you a free, high quality children’s bike! (http://
www.york.gov.uk/cgi-bin/wn_document.pl?type 5927).
8. I do not want to conclude this note without applying the by now familiar reasoning
to McEnery and Wilson’s question how the ungrammaticality of *He shines
Tony books could be determined without intuition judgments. Shine (in all its
senses) occurs 2,258 times in the BNC. On the assumptions made above, the expected
frequency of shine with ditransitive complementation would be 30; the
observed frequency is zero. This difference is highly significant (p 6.47E14)
even if we correct for multiple testing. Thus, without resorting to introspection,
we have proved that [shine ditransitive] is significantly absent. Whether this is
strictly due to ungrammaticality is doubtful: first, McEnery and Wilson’s sentence
is interpretable (albeit weird); second, it is possible to find authentic ditransitive
uses by certified native speakers of English for both senses of shine: (i) Shine me
a light from your eyes dear (Christine McVie, Show me a Smile [performed by
Fleetwood Mac]); (ii) He smiles telling him to shine him a metallic Purple armor
(Jimi Hendrix, Bold as Love). Thus, we could hypothsize that ditransitive uses of
shine are semantically so restricted that they occur only in very specific circumstances
(e. g., the ‘light’ reading can only occur ditransitively when the direct object
is light) or that they only occur in certain dialects (e. g., Lancashire [McVie]
and Seattle [Hendrix]) or registers (e. g., rock lyrics).
References
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Gries, Stefan Th. and Anatol Stefanowitsch
2004a Extending collostructional analysis: a corpus-based perspective on ‘alternations’.
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2004b Co-varying collexemes in the into-causative. In: Achard, Michel and Suzanne
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To appear Cluster analysis and the identification of collexeme classes. In John Newman
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Leech, Geoffrey, Paul Rayson, and Andrew Wilson
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