Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

62 A. Stefanowitsch
In this note, I would like to take issue with (a large part of) their
argument. I will argue that the idea that corpora do not contain negative
evidence is simply a special case of what I have termed the observedfrequency
(or raw-frequency) fallacy, i. e., the belief that “[o]bserved frequencies
of occurrence represent relevant facts for scientific analysis”
(Stefanowitsch 2005: 296). When approached with the right methodological
tools, corpora do provide negative evidence, i. e., evidence that
allows us, in principle, to distinguish between constructions that did not
occur but could have (these could be referred to as ‘accidentally absent’,
and constructions that did not occur and could not have (these can be
referred to as ‘significantly absent’ structures). Thus, while I do agree
that linguists cannot (and should not) ‘eschew introspection entirely’, I
will argue that they can (and largely should) eschew introspective judgments
of acceptability.
Collostructional analysis and the significance of absence
In this section, I will address the general issue of how significant absences
of a particular configuration of linguistic elements can be distinguished
from accidental ones, using as an example the ‘ability’ or ‘inability’ of
English verbs to occur with ditransitive complementation. The choice of
this example is motivated primarily by practical considerations: as will
presently become clear, the method I will use requires the researcher to
extract exhaustively from a corpus all occurrences of the grammatical
phenomenon in question. Ditransitive complementation happens to be
one of the features that is relatively uncontroversially tagged in the
largest grammatically annotated balanced corpus currently available, the
British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB, cf.
Nelson et al. 2002). However, it is a welcome coincidence that this is
precisely the complementation pattern that McEnery and Wilson chose
to demonstrate the need for grammaticality judgments. 1
The relevant method is one of several that Gries and I have developed
in a series of publications specifically for the purpose of investigating
the relationship between grammatical constructions and the words occurring
in them, and that we refer to collectively as collostructional
analysis (cf. e. g., Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, 2005, to appear a; Gries
and Stefanowitsch 2004a, b, to appear). 2 The most basic of these methods,
simple collexeme analysis, allows the researcher to identify words
that occur significantly more or less frequently than expected in a given
slot of a construction. This is done on the basis of a standard 2-by-2
contingency table containing four observed frequencies: (a) the frequency
of a given word in a particular slot of a given construction, (b)
the frequency of the same word in the corresponding slots of all other