Ditransitives in Swedish. A Usage-Based Study of the Double Object Construction and Semantically Equivalent Prepositional Object Constructions 1800–2016

The study examines the use of the Swedish double object construction (the DOC) and compares this with three semantically equivalent prepositional object constructions (POCs): the till-POC, the åt-POC and the för-POC. The study has a diachronic perspective, investigating changes in the use of these four constructions between 1800 and 2016. The data were collected from the National Language Bank of Sweden (Nationella Språkbanken). More specifically, the data are from the corpora listed below.

Svensk prosafiktion https://spraakbanken.gu.se/resurser/spf
Bonniersromaner 1976–77 https://spraakbanken.gu.se/resurser/romi
Bonniersromaner 1980–81 https://spraakbanken.gu.se/resurser/romii
Norstedtsromaner 1999 https://spraakbanken.gu.se/resurser/rom99
Bloggmix 2016. https://spraakbanken.gu.se/resurser/bloggmix2016

The data set contains examples of the Swedish double object construction (e.g. "ge ngn ngt" 'give sb. sth.', "visa ngn ngt" 'show sb. sth.') and semantically equivalent prepositional object constructions with the prepositions "till" (e.g. "ge ngt till ngn" 'give sth. to sb.'), "åt" (e.g. "ge ngt åt ngn" 'give sth. to sb.') and "för" (e.g. "visa ngt för ngn" 'show sth. to sb.'). The examples were collected from the corpora Svensk prosafiktion, Bonniersromaner I, Bonniersromaner II, Norstedtsromaner and Bloggmix 2016 (see the general description in Section 2). See Valdeson (2021) for a full account of the principles of data collection.