Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

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64 A. Stefanowitsch Table 2. Significantly attracted collexemes of the ditransitive in the ICE-GB Collexeme F(Corpus) F O (Ditr) F E (Ditr) FYE p-value give 1,091 560 14.57 0.00E000 tell 792 493 10.58 0.00E000 send 295 78 3.94 4.13E076 ask 504 92 6.73 9.65E074 show 628 84 8.39 5.15E056 offer 196 54 2.62 3.73E054 convince 32 23 0.43 1.70E036 cost 65 23 0.87 9.04E027 inform 55 20 0.73 9.57E024 teach 92 23 1.23 7.94E023 assure 19 13 0.25 1.04E020 remind 41 16 0.55 7.25E020 lend 31 12 0.41 3.48E015 promise 43 12 0.57 3.26E013 owe 25 9 0.33 2.24E011 grant 26 9 0.35 3.38E011 warn 38 10 0.51 5.94E011 award 16 7 0.21 7.72E010 persuade 33 8 0.44 1.03E008 allow 326 20 4.35 2.59E008 guarantee 27 7 0.36 5.27E008 deny 51 8 0.68 3.82E007 earn 56 8 0.75 8.03E007 hand 16 5 0.21 1.63E006 pay 395 18 5.28 8.66E006 give back 4 3 0.05 9.42E006 The list of verbs in this table could now serve as a basis for a variety of observations, for example about the meaning of the ditransitive complementation pattern. I will not pursue this issue here (but cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, Section 3.2.2). 4 Instead, let me point out two facts about the way that the label ‘ditransitive’ is applied in the ICE-GB. First, structures with nominal and with clausal direct objects are included under this label (i. e., uses like She told me that she wants to be free of lawyers and doctors [ICE GB s2a062 133] or I told him to drive the forklift truck [ICE GB s2a067 050] as well as the more obvious I’ve told you the truth [ICE GB w2 f.006 213]). Second, some verbs are tagged as ditransitive whose second object might be better analyzed as an oblique argument, e. g., cost, asinIt cost them three quid [ICE-GB s1a007 054]). 5 In other words, the label is applied rather generously. Next, consider Table 3, which shows the significantly repelled collexemes, sorted by repulsion strength (only the first two are significant at corrected levels).
Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy 65 Table 3. Significantly repelled collexemes of the ditransitive in the ICE-GB Collexeme F(Corpus) F O (Ditr) F E (Ditr) FYE p-value make 1,865 3 24.91 3.39E008 do 2,937 12 39.23 2.56E007 find 854 2 11.41 7.96E004 call 616 1 8.23 2.32E003 keep 374 1 5 3.95E002 One could now ask why verbs that occur in a given construction might do so less frequently than expected. There are several reasons, some of them more interesting than others. First, verbs may appear on this list because they are incorrectly tagged (in this case, call, which is tagged as ‘ditransitive’ in the utterance And the person who’s being called [ICE- GB s1a030 003]). Obviously, such incorrect tags are hard to eliminate completely once a corpus reaches a certain size. Second, some verbs appear on this list because their ditransitive uses are very restricted, in some cases to a single fixed expression (in this case, keep s. o. company). Finally, most verbs appear on this list because they occur very frequently with other complementation patterns (this is most obvious for the highfrequency verbs make and do, but it is also true of find). What one can take away from a discussion of such cases is, first, that fixed expressions must be taken into account in any linguistic analysis, and second, that complementation patterns exhibit a certain amount of productivity, occurring at least occasionally with verbs whose dominant patterns are others (both facts are unsurprising from the perspective of construction grammar, in which collostructional analysis first developed). However, the data in Table 3 do not speak directly to the issue of negative evidence yet: a further step is necessary. In our previous work, we have referred as ‘repelled’ only to those words which do occur in a given construction but do so less frequently than expected; however, as we noted in passing in our first paper (cf. Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003: 238), it is possible and perhaps logical to include in this category words that would have been expected to occur in the construction based on their overall frequency in the corpus, but did not, in fact, occur in the construction at all. This is the step that finally takes us to the issue of negative evidence: The range of frequencies of occurrence that can be evaluated for statistical significance include the limiting case of zero; in other words, the non-occurrence of a particular configuration of linguistic categories (for example, of a particular verb in a particular construction) can be compared to its expected frequency of occurrence. This will
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Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

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