Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

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68 A. Stefanowitsch Table 5. (continued) Collexeme F(Corpus) F O (Ditr) F E (Ditr) FYE p-value provide 380 0 5.08 5.99E003 live 378 0 5.05 6.16E003 remember 373 0 4.98 6.59E003 produce 328 0 4.38 1.21E002 speak 323 0 4.31 1.29E002 hope 316 0 4.22 1.42E002 run 309 0 4.13 1.56E002 change 306 0 4.09 1.63E002 meet 303 0 4.05 1.69E002 help 301 0 4.02 1.74E002 start 294 0 3.93 1.91E002 move 291 0 3.89 1.99E002 seem 285 0 3.81 2.16E002 agree 279 0 3.73 2.34E002 lead 271 0 3.62 2.60E002 expect 265 0 3.54 2.82E002 consider 264 0 3.53 2.86E002 suggest 259 0 3.46 3.06E002 describe 259 0 3.46 3.06E002 decide 259 0 3.46 3.06E002 understand 250 0 3.34 3.46E002 hold 249 0 3.33 3.50E002 require 244 0 3.26 3.75E002 involve 242 0 3.23 3.85E002 suppose 241 0 3.22 3.90E002 include 236 0 3.15 4.17E002 occur 233 0 3.11 4.35E002 develop 233 0 3.11 4.35E002 go on 231 0 3.09 4.46E002 follow 227 0 3.03 4.71E002 Two things about this table require discussion. First, it demonstrates that even a one-million-word corpus is too small to allow us to identify significant absences for more than a handful of cases (at least for a relatively rare pattern such as ditransitive complementation). I will discuss this problem in the remainder of this section and in the next section. Second, the results only tell us that a particular structure is significantly absent, they do not, as pointed out in the introduction, tell us why it is significantly absent. I will return to this problem in the final section. The problem of insufficient corpus size can ultimately only be solved by the creation of larger grammatically annotated corpora. However, in many individual cases it is possible to arrive at a fairly safe conclusion using currently available non-annotated corpora. Take the case of ex-
Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy 69 plain. In the 100-million-word British National Corpus (the largest balanced corpus of British English currently available), the verb explain occurs 18,334 times, but not once with ditransitive complementation. In Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003: 219), we estimated that the BNC contains 10,206,300 complementation patterns overall. If we assume that the proportion of ditransitives in the BNC is the same as in the ICE- GB, then the BNC should contain 136,332 ditransitives. Given these figures, we can now calculate the expected frequency of occurrence of explain in the ditransitive: 245. The difference between this and the observed frequency of zero is highly significant (at uncorrected levels of significance; p 6.73E108; < 0.001). Thus, the combination [explain ditransitive] can be categorized as a significantly absent structure based on negative corpus evidence. This strategy works even with a lowfrequency verb like whisper, which occurs only 2,976 times in the BNC, but, again, does not occur in the ditransitive. Under the assumptions just outlined, the expected frequency of [whisper ditransitive] is 40. Again, the difference is highly significant (at uncorrected levels; p 4.139019E18; < 0.001). 6 Repeating individual tests on a larger corpus will, of course, not invariably lead to the conclusion that a given structure is significantly absent. In many cases, the frequency of a verb will remain too low to yield significant results. For example, the verb oxidise, like whisper, occurs five times in the ICE-GB, never in the ditransitive. In the BNC, it occurs 99 times, also never in the ditransitive. The expected frequency in this case is 1 (1.32, to be precise), and the difference between this and the observed frequency of zero is still far too small to reach statistical significance (p 0.26; >0.05). In other cases, extending a search to a larger corpus will fail to replicate the zero occurrence in the smaller corpus. For example, the BNC contains one clear example of donate with ditransitive complementation (1a), and a second potential one (1b): (1) a. Saudi king donates Laura transplant money. The king of Saudi Arabia has donated a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to Laura Davies ... (K1N) b. ... if the villagers hadn’t so kindly donated her furnishings, she’d probably still be existing in empty rooms ... (H95). 7 Faced with such examples, there is no longer any reason to believe that [donate ditransitive] is a significantly absent structure. Thus, the methodological problem of insufficiently large corpora is not, in principle, an argument against replacing intuitive grammaticality judgments by negative corpus evidence (in practice it may be, a point which I will return to below). Instead, the preceding discussion shows
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Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

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