The Ditransitive Construction of the Synonyms ‘Give’, ‘Offer’, and ‘Provide’: A Corpus-Based Study of Twenty English Varieties

Abstract

While synonymy has been extensively studied, few studies have examined the ditransitive construction of synonyms across English varieties. Informed by construction grammar viewing pattern-meaning combinations as constructions and using a 1.9-billion-word corpus of texts from 20 countries, this article analyzes four different ways of expressing ditransitivity by the synonyms give, offer, and provide, which share the core sense of ‘giving’. This analysis enables the exploration of syntactic variation between standard and variant patterns across 20 English varieties. The results show that the double-object pattern (e.g., give me a book) is preferred over its prepositional variants (e.g., give a book to me); while this pattern is standard for give and offer, it is not true of provide. As regards the varieties, ditransitive patterns are similar across the synonyms, except provide which alternates frequently among four syntactic variants across the varieties. The cluster analyses also show that, despite belonging to the same concentric circle, the varieties differ in the ditransitive patterns of the synonyms. Overall, the results demonstrate that semantic similarity tends to contribute more to syntactic frames than regional factors. This article offers several implications for teaching synonymy and ditransitivity from constructional and World Englishes perspectives.