Constructional Variation With Two Near-Synonymous Verbs - The Case of Schicken and Senden in Present-Day German

Language Sciences 83 (2021) 101313
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Language Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci
Constructional variation with two near-synonymous verbs:

the case of schicken and senden in present-day German
Hilde De Vaere a, *, Ludovic De Cuypere a, b, Klaas Willems a
a
General Linguistics, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent, Belgium
b
Centre for Linguistics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussel, Belgium
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: This article reports on the results of a corpus-based study of alternating ditransitive
Received 1 April 2019 argument structures comprising an AGENT-like, a THEME-like and a RECIPIENT-like argument in
Received in revised form 15 May 2020 combination with the ditransitive verbs schicken and senden in present-day German. The
Accepted 24 June 2020
alternation concerns the Indirect Object Construction with the ADDRESSEE (i.e. the RECIPIENT-
Available online 3 August 2020
like argument) expressed in the dative case (IOC) and the Prepositional Object Construc-
tion with the ADDRESSEE either introduced by the preposition an (þ accusative) or zu (þ
Keywords:
dative) (POC). The quantitative analysis (logistic regression and Conditional Inference Tree)
German
Ditransitive alternation
is based on N ¼ 2689 naturally occurring sentences drawn from the Deutsches Refer-
Construction and verb valency enzkorpus (IDS Mannheim). The article first presents a probabilistic account of the data
schicken/senden that aims to predict the interplay of a wide array of morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic
Accusative and processing factors. The problem with an exclusively semantic explanation of the
Dative alternation is that both IOC and POC can express the same senses. However, there are
Prepositional object tendencies that relate IOC in particular to pronominal and individual ADDRESSEEs, whereas
Probabilistic approach POC correlates more strongly with collective, dual reference and object ADDRESSEEs as well as
Semantics/pragmatics interface
passive voice. The article then proposes a typologically-informed account of the data that
Semantic underspecification
combines a constructional analysis with valency theory and a layered approach to the
Allostruction
meanings of both the schematic argument structure construction and the verbs schicken
and senden. The account corroborates the narrow definition of a construction as an
encoded form-meaning pairing that allows for formal and pragmatic variation of the
RECIPIENT-like argument. Accordingly, IOC and POC are not considered constructions in their
own right but variants of a semantically underdetermined construction with an under-
specified GOAL argument in present-day German.
Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The event of someone or some instance transferring something or someone to another person or instance can be
expressed in different ways in present-day German. We refer to the three roles involved in the expression of such a transfer
event by using the labels ‘AGENT-like argument’, ‘THEME-like argument’ and ‘RECIPIENT-like argument’ – or AGENT, THEME and RECIPIENT
* Corresponding author. Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of General Linguistics, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000, Gent, Belgium.
E-mail address: hilde.devaere@ugent.be (H. De Vaere).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101313
0388-0001/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 H. De Vaere et al. / Language Sciences 83 (2021) 101313
for short.1 This article investigates two variants of the ditransitive argument structure construction that are commonly used to
express such a transfer, viz. the Indirect Object Construction with the RECIPIENT in the dative case (henceforth: IOC), as illus-
trated in (1) and (2), and the Prepositional Object Construction with the RECIPIENT coded as a prepositional NP (henceforth: POC)
((3) and (4):2
(1) Sie schickten <uns> per Fax und E-Mail [ihre Meinung].
they send.IPFV we.DAT per Fax and e-mail their.ACC opinion
‘They sent us by fax and e-mail their opinion.’
(2) Dieter G. sandte <der Europäischen Fußball-Union> [eine deutliche Botschaft].

Dieter G. send.IPFV the.DAT European Football Union a.ACC clear message
‘Dieter G. sent the European Football Union a clear message’
(3) Er sollte [die Gerichtsakten] nicht <an ihr Kloster> schicken.

he must.SUBJ the.ACC court records not to her.ACC monastery send.INF
‘He should not send the court records to her monastery.’
(4) Netz sandte [eine SMS] <an seine Sekretärin>.

Netz send.IPFV an.ACC SMS to his.ACC secretary
‘Netz sent an SMS to his secretary.’
We refer to this alternation as the ditransitive alternation. Following authors such as Wunderlich (2006), Malchukov et al.
(2010) and Haspelmath and Baumann (2013), we define the ditransitive construction (in the active voice) as a construction
with two objects which code the THEME and the RECIPIENT in addition to a subject coding the AGENT. With regard to the meaning of
schicken and senden it is convenient to refer to the RECIPIENT as ADDRESSEE, irrespective of whether the THEME is speech, a letter, etc.
or an object more generally.
The ditransitive alternation bears resemblance to the so-called dative alternation in English and Dutch (sometimes also
called dative shift or dative movement), yet there are important differences. We use the abbreviation IOC rather than DOC to
avoid any confusion that may stem from the fact that the abbreviation DOC is universally adopted in reference to the Double
Object Construction. This construction has received more attention than any other variant in research on the so-called dative
alternation, in particular in English and other Germanic languages (cf. Bresnan and Nikitina, 2003; Colleman, 2006; Bresnan
et al., 2007; Levin, 2008; Rappaport-Hovav and Levin, 2008; Bresnan and Ford, 2010; Geleyn, 2016). In English, DOC has
“neutral alignment”, i.e. both objects are coded in the same way as the monotransitive PATIENT/THEME, compare He gave <the
woman>[the bottle] with He saw [the woman] and He saw [the bottle]. POC has “indirective alignment” because the RECIPIENT is
introduced by a preposition (He gave [the bottle] <to the woman>) (cf. Haspelmath, 2013). By contrast, in German both IOC and
POC have “indirective alignment”: the THEME is in the accusative and the RECIPIENT is either in the dative (hence IOC) or
introduced by a preposition (POC). As a matter of fact, German also has DOC, with both objects in the accusative case.
However, DOC is rare in present-day German and only attested with a handful of verbs (e.g. lehren ‘teach’ and kosten ‘cost’).
Furthermore, compared to the relatively fixed word order in English, German has a freer word order and both variants
occur in varying syntactic arrangements: e.g. (5) IOC with THEME-RECIPIENT, which is ungrammatical in present-day English,
except in some cases of regional variation, e.g. give it me in a number of English dialects, cf. (Gast, 2007; Gerwin, 2013), and (6)
POC with RECIPIENT-THEME order (which is also grammatical but rare in English).
(5) Nussbaum habe [diese Bilder mit Motiven aus Südfrankreich und
Nussbaum have.SUBJ these.ACC pictures with motifs from the South of France and
der belgischen Hafenstadt Ostende] <der Familie Klein> aus seinem Exil in Belgien
the Belgian port of Ostend the.DAT Klein family out of his exile in Belgium
geschickt.
send.PTCP
‘Nussbaum is said to have sent these pictures with motifs from the South of France and the Belgian port of Ostend to the Klein family out of
his exile in Belgium.’
(6) Bürgermeister Rudolf Hakel hatte <an jeden Haushalt>

Mayor Rudolf Hakel have.IPFV to each.ACC household
[einen Brief mit aufgedrucktem Stadtwappen] geschickt.
a.ACC letter with printed coat of arms send.PTCP
’Mayor Rudolf Hakel had sent a letter to each household with a coat of arms printed on it.’
1
The reason why AGENT-like, THEME-like and RECIPIENT-like are, strictly speaking, more appropriate is that a difference should be observed between
the underspecified encoded roles that are part of the grammar of the language and the specific thematic roles that are the object of denotation (reference)
in discourse and language use; cf. Coseriu (1987) and see Ágel (2000), Höllein (2019), among others, for discussion. The difference between the two types of
roles is co-extensive with the distinction between semantics and pragmatics to which we return in Section 5.
2
The following abbreviations are used in accordance with the Leipzig glossing rules: ACC accusative, DAT dative, INF infinitive, NOM nominative, IPFV
imperfective, PASS passive, PRS present, PTCP participle, SUBJ subjunctive. The RECIPIENT is indicated between angle brackets and the THEME between square brackets.
H. De Vaere et al. / Language Sciences 83 (2021) 101313 3
The ditransitive alternation occurs with a considerable number of verbs expressing some kind of transfer in
present-day German, including simplex verbs such as geben ‘give’, schicken, senden ‘send’ and morphologically complex
verbs such as verkaufen ‘sell’, übergeben ‘hand over’, weitergeben ‘pass on’, zurückschicken ‘send back’, einsenden
‘submit’ etc.
The present study focuses on schicken and senden.3 These two verbs are particularly interesting in light of the
Ditransitivity Hierarchy advocated by Croft et al. (2001: 6), who, in an attempt to discriminate meanings of transfer verbs,
argue that the constraints on the alternation are related to a hierarchy that can be observed in Germanic languages: the
higher the verbs are situated on the hierarchy, the more they will occur in the prepositionless variant of the ditransitive
construction. As give, send and throw do not behave identically across Germanic languages, Croft et al. (2001) argue that the
nature of the events determines the alternation. In their view, give-type verbs have a high degree of inherent transfer and
are accordingly more likely to be used with DOC and a caused possession interpretation than throw-type verbs, which
would favour a prepositional phrase and a caused motion interpretation; send-type verbs are located in the middle of the
hierarchy and can express both caused possession and caused motion (Croft et al., 2001: 16). This analysis agrees with
Rappaport-Hovav and Levin's (2008) claim that the syntactic behaviour of transfer verbs can be explained semantically (cf.
Malchukov et al., 2007: 48), (cf. also Goldberg, 1995; Krifka, 1999; Goldberg, 2003; Adler, 2011; Beavers, 2011; Levin and
Rappaport-Hovav, 2011; Proost, 2015).
The German verbs schicken and senden correspond to the English verb send. Interestingly, while in English only the
preposition to4 occurs in POC, with schicken and senden the RECIPIENT in POC can either be introduced by the preposition an (þ
accusative), cf. (3) and (4), or by zu (þ dative), cf. (7) and (8):
(7) Man kann ja nicht <zu jedem Taxifahrer>

one can.PRS yet not to every.DAT taxidriver
[einen Steuerfahnder] schicken.
a.ACC tax inspector send.INF
‘Nevertheless, one cannot send a tax inspector to every taxi driver.’
(8) Stattdessen sende ich [es] dann <zu meiner Psychiaterin>.

instead send.PRS I it.ACC then to my.DAT psychiatrist
‘Instead I then send it to my psychiatrist.’
Because of the morphosyntactic and word order differences between English and German, the question arises what factors
correlate with the observed alternation in present-day German compared to English.
After conducting a quantitative analysis of the data in which we investigate the various correlating factors that bear on the
alternation (cf. e.g. Gries, 2003a, 2003b; Bresnan, 2007; Bresnan et al., 2007; Bresnan and Ford, 2010; Theijssen, 2012; De
Cuypere and Verbeke, 2013), we will propose a typologically-informed account that combines a constructional analysis (cf.
Goldberg, 1995, 2003, 2006; Hilpert, 2014; Perek, 2015) with valency theory (cf. Tesnière, 2015 and Ágel, 2000; Herbst and
Götz-Votteler, 2007; Welke, 2011). This will allow us to develop a layered approach to the meanings of both the argument
structure construction and the verbs schicken and senden along the lines of authors like Coseriu (1987); Grice (1989 [1967])
and Levinson (2000). The details of the approach will be discussed as we move along, but it is important to establish from the
outset that we will use “construction” according to the narrow definition rather than the broad definition. The broad defi-
nition is the one commonly adopted in current constructionist accounts. It entails that any pattern is recognized as a con-
struction even if it is fully predictable from its component parts as long as it occurs “with sufficient frequency” (Goldberg,
2006: 5). By contrast, according to the narrow definition a construction is a form-meaning pairing that is neither formally
nor semantically strictly predictable from its component parts or from other constructions, irrespective of frequency of
occurrence, cf. Goldber (1995: 4) and in particular also the discussion in Stefanowitsch (2011)). More specifically, we will
argue that defining an argument structure construction as a form-meaning pairing in its own right rests on the assumption
that the construction's encoded meaning is not compositionally derivable from the encoded meanings of the lexical items
(including the verb) that instantiate it.
The article addresses the following research questions:
1. What is the extent of the constructional variation between IOC and POC with schicken and senden in present-day
German as measured by their relative occurrence in contemporary corpus data?
2. What morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic and processing factors can be shown to have a bearing on the realization of
both constructional variants IOC and POC (the latter either with an or zu)?
3
The study is part of a larger on-going research project at the Linguistics Department of Ghent University that investigates the ditransitive alternation in
present-day German with the following verbs: geben, abgeben, ausleihen, einschicken, einsenden, preisgeben, übergeben, übersenden, verkaufen, verleihen,
weitergeben, weiterschicken, zurückgeben, zurückschicken and zurücksenden.
4
An anonymous reviewer points out that prepositions such as into, onto and towards are marginally attested as well.
3. What are the implications that ensue from our findings with regard to the theory of argument structure con-
structions such as the ditransitive construction, in particular regarding a construction's variation in form and
meaning?
The structure of the article is as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews previous research, with a focus on German. Section 3
presents the data of the study and outlines the methodology adopted for the quantitative analysis of the data. We apply a
logistic regression analysis to evaluate the effect of the predictor variables on the occurrence of both constructional var-
iants (POC vs. IOC) and a conditional inference tree analysis to determine the different factors that correlate with either an-
POC or zu-POC. In Section 4 we present the results of the quantitative analysis and we supply examples from the dataset
that illustrate the factors that prove to be significant. In Section 5 we provide a discussion of the data in which we combine
a constructional analysis with valency theory and develop a layered approach to constructional and verb meanings in terms
of what we consider to be a key issue of the ditransitive alternation at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Section 6
concludes the article with a summary of the results from the point of view of the theoretical framework outlined in the
previous section.
2. Previous research
The verb send is one of the verbs that are widely discussed in the literature on the dative alternation in English (e.g.
Bresnan and Nikitina, 2003; Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2003: 227–230; Gries, 2003b; Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004; Bresnan
et al., 2007; Levin, 2008; Rappaport-Hovav and Levin, 2008; Bresnan and Ford, 2010: 178; Beavers, 2011, among others). By
contrast, the corresponding German verbs schicken and senden and the corresponding alternation in German in general have
thus far received much less attention.
According to Rappaport-Hovav and Levin's (2008) verb sensitive approach, argument realisation for English dative
verbs depends on the semantics of the individual verb. Levin and Rappaport-Hovav (2011), discuss whether German send-
type verbs lexicalize caused motion or caused possession. They claim that schicken in combination with an inanimate THEME
either occurs in IOC, expressing a caused possession event, or in zu-POC, whereas schicken with an animate THEME is only
observed in zu-POC for which no possessive paraphrase of the type ‘X causes Y to receive Z’ is available (Levin and
Rappaport-Hovav, 2011: 6). However, the authors seem to disregard cases of IOC with inanimate RECIPIENTs nor do they
pay attention to the verb senden and PPs with an. Our corpus analysis will provide counterexamples to Levin and Rap-
paport-Hovav's account (cf. Section 5).
Adler (2011) provides a fine-grained analysis of the semantic and syntactic factors that govern the constructional variation
with five different verb classes and she discusses the schicken-type verbs in detail. Adler adheres to the verb sensitive
approach of Rappaport-Hovav and Levin, according to which schicken-type verbs lexicalize a change of location but are also
compatible with caused possession. Adler specifies that the joint semantics of the verb and direct object (DO) determine the
use of a prepositional phrase (PP) (Adler, 2011: 252). Adler's study is only to a very limited extent based on naturally occurring
data. By contrast, the present article analyses a large set of corpus sentences with schicken and senden with regard to a number
of factors that potentially motivate the alternation between IOC and POC.
Proost (2015) challenges the verb sensitive approach proposed by Rappaport-Hovav and Levin (2008) by testing the
successful transfer inference and the presence/absence of a PATH argument with different German verbs of transfer.
Proost (2015) concludes that the meaning of ditransitive structures not only depends on the interaction of the verb and
the construction, but also on the lexical semantics of the PP, in particular as regards the difference between animate
and inanimate RECIPIENTs and the interaction of the preposition with the animacy of the RECIPIENT. According to Proost
(2015: 14) a sentence such as Er faxt die Nachricht an seinen/zu seinem Kollegen ‘He faxes the message to his
colleague’ can alternate with Er faxt seinem Kollegen die Nachricht, but IOC is ungrammatical if the RECIPIENT is inanimate
(e.g. Postadresse ‘mailing address’) because no caused possession interpretation is possible. However, our data shows
that IOC occurs with inanimate RECIPIENTs as well. Based on these and similar findings, we will offer an alternative
account of the IOC/POC alternation, which is not based on pragmatic functions such as ‘caused possession’ and ‘caused
motion’ but instead develops a layered account of the meanings of the verbs and the construction in which they occur
(Section 5).
De Vaere et al. (2018) explore the ditransitive alternation with the German verb geben. Some of their findings are
particularly interesting for the present article. First, POC appears to be correlated to various factors, including various
transfer senses of the verb geben (in particular concrete and propositional senses), whether or not RECIPIENT or AGENT refer
to a collective entity, etc. Second, the authors argue that geben possesses a general, underspecified verb meaning (in
semantics), which is considered the basis of a wide range of uses of the verb in various contexts (in pragmatics). Finally,
with geben the two constructional variants are found to have unmarked word orders: IOC is generally observed in
RECIPIENT-THEME and POC in THEME-RECIPIENT order. We will investigate to what extent these findings for geben can be applied
to schicken and senden.
There are many approaches to syntactic alternation. In this study, before developing our own framework we
concentrate on the two approaches that either focus on the semantics of the verb (cf. for German schicken-verbs: Croft
et al., 2001; Levin and Rappaport-Hovav, 2011; Proost, 2015) or on multifactorial analyses of naturally occurring sen-
tences (cf. Gries, 2003b; Bresnan et al., 2007). With regard to the latter, the present study builds on previous probabilistic
research of the dative/ditransitive alternation (cf. Gries, 2003b; Bresnan et al., 2007; Bresnan and Ford, 2010; Theijssen,
2012; De Cuypere and Verbeke, 2013; De Vaere et al., 2018; among others) and focuses on a range of potentially
motivating morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic and processing factors that are assumed to operate simultaneously. We
also assume that the impact effects of each individual factor can be estimated by means of quantitative modelling of
corpus data.
3. Methodology
3.1. Data collection
Our data source is the Deutsches ReferenzKorpus (DeReKo), a 42 billion words corpus (state 13.11.2018) consisting of written
present-day German texts from fiction, scientific and non-specialist texts, a large number of newspaper articles and other text
varieties. We accessed the data through the web interface COSMAS IIweb.
To answer the first research question regarding the extent of the constructional variation between IOC and POC with
schicken and senden in present-day German as measured by their relative occurrence, we collected a data sample using the
queries “&schicken” and “&senden” in the “W-öffentlich” DeReKo database (W-öffentlich ¼ the publicly accessible part of the
Archiv der geschriebenen Sprache ‘archives of written language’; 31.900.909 of the 38.678.325 texts). These particular queries
retrieve sentences with all conjugated forms of the verbs schicken and senden in the corpus. To maximize the randomization
effect we created four separate random samples of 100 hits for each verb and then calculated the relative frequencies for each
construction and verb.
For the second research question we created a new sample with the queries “&schicken”, “&senden” and “&senden NICHT
an”. The latter query was added to retrieve instances of senden þNP, because POC occurrences initially greatly outnumbered
IOC occurrences for senden. DeReKo returns a maximum output of 10.000 sentences. We used the initial samples of 10.000
observations for schicken and senden to manually filter and collect a roughly equal number of IOC and POC occurrences for
both verbs.
The following instances (of both IOC and POC) were excluded from the dataset:
For schicken: sentences with monotransitive compound verbs such as wegschicken ‘send away’, losschicken ‘send away’,
heimschicken ‘send home’, reflexive constructions with sich schicken ‘comply with’ and sich anschicken ‘prepare to’, and
sentences without an overt RECIPIENT (e.g. Die Polizei hat sofort Einsatzteams geschickt ‘The police immediately sent task
forces’).
For senden: all sentences in which senden instantiates the sense ‘broadcast’ (e.g. Postillon-Witze werden seit längerem im
Radio auf Bayern3 gesendet ‘Postillon-jokes have been broadcast on Bayern3 for a long time’, ARD sendet live ab 20.15 Uhr
‘ARD broadcasts live from 8.15 pm’), because they are not ditransitive. We also excluded the frequent occurrences of the
compound verbs zusenden ‘send, forward’ and aussenden ‘send out’, because we restricted the dataset to the simplex
verb senden.
Basically, all non-alternating instances, i.e. instances that could not be converted into the respective variant of the
alternation, were discarded. According to this diagnostic test, the following instances were also excluded from the dataset:
Although POC5 with the prepositions an and zu can alternate with IOC, idiomatic chunks such as zum Teufel schicken
‘send to hell’, zur Schule schicken/senden ‘send to school’, were discarded, given that in these cases no alternation is
possible. By the same token, purely directional uses of the prepositions an and zu (e.g. an die Front schicken ‘send to the
front line’, zur Insel senden ‘send to the island’) were also excluded.
5
Sentences with directional PPs with in, auf and nach that designate a DESTINATION were excluded, (e.g. ins Ausland schicken/senden ‘to send abroad’, aufs
Handy senden ‘send to the mobile phone’, nach Laos senden ‘send to Laos’) as they are not considered ditransitive for lack of a RECIPIENT-like argument.
Moreover, they do not alternate. For the same reason, we excluded idiomatic chunks (“fixed goal idioms”, according to Levin and Rappaport-Hovav (2011: 9)
with these prepositions such as auf die Reise schicken ‘send out on a journey’, ins Rennen schicken ‘send into the race’. Schicken and senden combine with
several directional prepositions: durch, um, unter, über, vor (e.g. durch die Stadt schicken ‘send through the city’, um die Welt schicken ‘send around the world’,
unter die Dusche schicken ‘send to the showers’, über den Rhein schicken ‘send across the Rhine’, vor die Tür schicken ‘send outside the door’). We do not
further consider these uses, as the IOC/POC alternation does not apply to them.
Instances with PPs introduced with zu and having an event-reading such as zum Duschen schicken ‘send to the showers’,
zum Wintersport schicken ‘send to the winter sports’. Again, no alternation is possible.
Following other studies that systematically exclude benefactives from their research (e.g. Bresnan and Nikitina,
2003: 26; Levin, 2006: 7; Bresnan et al., 2007: 91; Theijssen, 2012: 2; Röthlisberger et al., 2017: 679), we dis-
carded instances in which the dative has to be analysed as a dativus commodi (BENEFICIARY) or dativus incommodi
(MALEFICIARY), except when the semantic role was ambiguous, e.g. Die Staatsanwälte sind ungläubig und schicken ihm
den Amtsarzt ins Krankenhaus ‘The prosecutors are sceptical and send the public health officer to the hospital for
him/to him’.
We also disregarded bekommen, erhalten and lassen passives (e.g. Er bekommt vom Arbeitsamt Bewerber geschickt ‘He gets
applicants sent by the employment office’) because in these passives there is no IOC/POC alternation.
Because we applied a bottom-up approach, initially an additional factor ‘address’ was added to the list of variables.
However, this variable showed no constructional variation at all (only POC cases were observed), therefore we excluded
all sentences in which an address or the word Addresse or Anschrift appeared.
It was observed that IOC and POC with an can be combined in one and the same clause, resulting in a constructional
pattern we term ‘IOPOC’ for convenience sake; compare:
(9) Senden Sie <uns> [eine Mail] an mopokultur@mopo.de.

‘Send us an email to mopokultur@mopo.de’.
Sentences such as (9) were not included because in all instances of IOPOC in our data, the PP designates an address
which invariably entails POC. Moreover, it could be argued that the dative NP in (9) is best analysed as an external
possessor rather than a RECIPIENT, so that IOPOC sentences are actually instances of POC with an extra argument added. In
that case these sentences would not qualify for the dataset either, as IOC/POC alternation is no option.
The final dataset consists of 2689 observations: 1343 with schicken (666 IOC, 677 POC of which 525 with an and 152
with zu), and 1346 with senden (660 IOC, 686 POC of which 566 with an and 120 with zu). To create comparable datasets
with the geben dataset in De Vaere et al. (2018), we selected sentences from German (D), Austrian (AT), Swiss (CH) and
Wikipedia (W) sources (D ¼ 68%, AT ¼ 14%, CH ¼ 11%, W ¼ 7%). We included both possible orders of RECIPIENT and THEME
(IOC with RECIPIENT-THEME and THEME-RECIPIENT and POC with THEME-RECIPIENT and RECIPIENT-THEME) as well as all possible other
constituent orders regarding the position of the subject and the (lexical) verb. By examining the frequencies for each
order, we aim to establish whether IOC and POC have preferred or unmarked word orders. Recall that with geben, IOC
was mainly observed with RECIPIENT-THEME order and POC almost exclusively with THEME-RECIPIENT order (De Vaere et al.,
2018).
3.2. Data annotation
For the second part of the study the cleaned data was copied to an Excel file and all 2689 observations were annotated for
23 factors. The choice of factors was inspired by corpus-based research on the English dative alternation (e.g. Gries, 2003b;
Bresnan et al., 2007; Bresnan and Ford, 2010; Theijssen, 2012; Röthlisberger et al., 2017) and also on the German verb geben
(De Vaere et al., 2018). The dependent variable consists of the factor ‘constructional variant’ (IOC vs. POC). The AGENT was
annotated for animacy6, the THEME and RECIPIENT for animacy, concreteness, definiteness, givenness, pronominality and length
difference (length of RECIPIENT minus length of THEME), the RECIPIENT for propernounhood and syncretism, the VERB for verb,
transfer sense, subsense and voice. We also annotated the variables Origin, Metaphor, Topicalization and the collocation
strength between the THEME and the verb. Below we discuss each variable in turn.
Animacy of RECIPIENT and THEME: “individual”, “collective”, “loc.coll”, “loc.obj” and “object”. “Individual” refers to persons
(e.g. Mutter ‘mother’), “collective” to groups of individuals or bodies (e.g. Verwaltung ‘administration’). “Loc.coll” (e.g. Polizei
‘police’) and “loc.obj” (e.g. Gehirn ‘brain’) refer to dual reference NPs which either refer to a location or a collective/an object or
to both at the same time (cf. Pustejovsky, 1995: 91–92, 181). “Object” refers to objects (e.g. Fernseher ‘television set’). Animacy
of RECIPIENT proved difficult to determine for certain instances. In order to evaluate the reliability of the annotation a random
sample of 100 sentences was annotated by an independent annotator. Comparing both annotations by means of Cohen's
Kappa yielded a score of 0.85, which indicates a very good inter-annotator agreement.
Concreteness of RECIPIENT and THEME: “abstract” (e.g. Neid ‘envy’), “concrete” (e.g. Bild ‘photo’), “propositional”, i.e.
conveying linguistic information as a physical object (e.g. Brief ‘letter’) or as a content (e.g. Antwort ‘answer’).
Definiteness of RECIPIENT and THEME: “definite” (e.g. ihre Ideen ‘her ideas’), “indefinite” (e.g. Hilfe ‘help’).
6
Because there were too many cases in which the AGENT was ‘not expressed’ (such as passives, infinitives and imperatives, e.g. Daraufhin wurde ihm das
Radarfoto geschickt ‘Then the radar photo was sent to him’, Eine weitere Möglichkeit ist, dem Fernseher über eine DVD ein weißes Vollbild zu senden ‘Another
option is to send the TV via a DVD a white full screen’, Schickt uns bis 15. Juli ein Foto von euch ‘Send us a picture of you by July 15th’) the factor AgentAnim
was excluded from further statistical modelling.
Pronominality of RECIPIENT and THEME: “nominal” (e.g. Konzept ‘concept’), pronominal (e.g. ihn ‘him’).
Givenness of RECIPIENT and THEME: “given”, “accessible”, “new”. “Given” encompasses the cognitive status “activated” in
Gundel et al.’s (1993: 275) “Givenness Hierarchy”. If information is recoverable from the preceding context, it is annotated
as “accessible”, if it is introduced for the first time, it is “new”. One practical problem that we experienced during the
annotation process of this variable concerns the lack of pre-contexts. As part of the export process in DeReKo we
generated as much pre-context as possible, but especially with newspaper articles the pre-context is often inherently
limited due to the shortness of the articles (e.g. the first sentences of an article). Whereas Gries (2003b: 8) uses distance-
to-last-mention and times-of-preceding-mention in the previous 10 clauses as a measurement, we decided to compute
givenness not as a quantitative, but as a categorical factor (under a quantitative approach, a considerable amount of
tokens would have to be excluded from the dataset because of lack of sufficient pre-context). In order to qualify as
“given”, the words to which the givenness label applies do not have to precede the sentence in their literal form: e.g. seine
Werke can also be considered co-referential with Liebesbriefe in the preceding context if it is clear that both refer to the
same object. Conversely, lexical similarity or (partial) lexical reiteration does not automatically entail given information.
In (10), although the information provided in the THEME eine E-Mail ‘an e-mail’ is introduced by means of mein E-Mail-
Verteiler ‘my e-mail distribution list’ in the preceding sentence (in bold), THEME does not qualify as “given”. It is annotated
as “accessible”.
(10) Wie verhindere ich, dass mein E-Mail-Verteiler einsehbar ist? Wenn Sie [eine E-Mail] <an eine Verteilerliste> senden, geben Sie .
‘How do I prevent my e-mail distribution list from being visible? If you send an e-mail to a mailing list, enter ...’
Furthermore, all RECIPIENTs consisting of the pronoun uns (‘us’) in sentences drawn from newspapers in which uns un-
equivocally stands for the editorial staff, were annotated as “given”. By contrast, whenever uns refers to somebody else than
the editorial staff of the newspaper, the givenness status of the pronoun can also be “accessible” or if necessary “new”, e.g.
(11):
(11) Uns hat man keinen Notarzt geschickt,.

‘They didn’t send us an emergency doctor, .’
Propernounhood of RECIPIENT: “proper noun” (e.g. Lilli Palmer), common noun (e.g. seiner Frau ‘to his wife’).
Number of RECIPIENT: “singular” (e.g. dem Partner ‘to the partner’), “plural” (e.g. seinen Kindern ‘to his children’).
Transfer sense of the sentence verb: we consider the main verb as the central valency-bearing constituent of the sen-
tence in accordance with valency theory (Tesnière, 2015; Ágel, 2000, among others). A verb's quantitative valency concerns
the number of arguments, its qualitative valency their semantic functions. With regard to the latter we distinguished three
senses, in line with previous research on the semantics of give and geben (cf. Mukherjee, 2005: 36; Bresnan et al., 2007: 85;
Bernaisch et al., 2014: 13; De Vaere et al., 2018: 12): “abstract” (e.g. Es sandte mir das Schicksal frühen Schlaf ‘Fate sent me early
sleep’), “concrete” (e.g. Schickt uns eure Zeichnungen bitte bis Samstag, 25. November ‘Please send us your drawings before
Saturday, 25th November’), and “propositional” (e.g. Wer weitere Ideen hat, kann diese an Helmut Dieth senden ‘If you have
further ideas, you can send them to Helmut Dieth’).
Subsense of the sentence verb: because the tripartite division between the concrete, propositional and abstract sense
of the valency-bearing verb is not sufficiently fine-grained, we further distinguished nine subsenses, “A” to “I”. These
subsenses were established by taking into account the qualitative valency of the verbs, i.e. the meaning of the arguments
that instantiate the three-place sentence pattern. Subsense A “information: dual reference” applies when both the
content and the material form of the information are expressed, by means of lexical items such as Zettel ‘note’, Rechnung
‘bill’, Prospekt ‘prospectus’ etc.; both aspects of the information are equally relevant in the context of the sentence. By
contrast, subsense B “information: content” profiles the information's content by means of words such as Gruß
‘greeting’, Botschaft ‘message’, Warnung ‘warning’. Designations of emotions such as Liebe ‘love’, Geduld ‘patience’, Wärme
‘warmth’ also belong to subsense B “information: content”. The subsense C “object” covers all literal sending of objects,
such as Proben ‘samples’, Geschenke ‘gifts’, Päckchen ‘packages’. When persons are sent to persons, either for reasons of
assistance, educational purposes, on a mission, e.g. to deliver a message to a person higher in rank, or to become a
member of a group, subsense D “person” applies. The subsense E “religious” is very specific and involves the religious
interpretation of a sending event. The AGENT is usually of a divine nature, e.g. God who sends his son to the people. In the
subsense F “meteorological” the AGENT-like entity is a weather phenomenon such as Tief Nancy ‘low pressure area Nancy’,
die Sonne ‘the sun’, der Nordwestenwind ‘the northwest wind’, while the THEMEs are Wolken ‘clouds’, Schnee ‘snow’, Son-
nenstrahlen ‘sunbeams’ etc. The subsense G “financial” concerns the sending of money (in various forms, including by
deposit, bank transfer etc.); typical THEMEs are Geld ‘money’, Dollar, Schecks ‘checks’. The subsense H “technical” obtains
when a technical device such as a sensor, a car or some other instrument transfers a signal or an impulse to another
technical device. Subsense I “activity” is observed in cases where someone's behaviour sends a sign or signal to a mostly
animate RECIPIENT.
Voice: “active” (e.g. Diese senden Schmerzsignale an unser Gehirn ‘These send pain signals to our brain‘) vs. “passive” (e.g.
Daraufhin wurde ihm das Radarfoto geschickt ‘Subsequently, the radar photo was sent to him’).
Topicalization: “no”, “THEME”, “RECIPIENT”. Topicalization has a bearing on sentences in which either the RECIPIENT or the THEME
are moved to sentence initial position, as in (12):
(12) <Bekannten> schickt er [SMS, die mit “heil” enden].

‘To acquaintances he sends SMS ending with “heil”.’
Syncretism of the RECIPIENT: “explicit” vs. “nonexplicit”. Syncretism concerns the morphological appearance of the RECIPIENT:
because plural pronouns such as uns and euch are syncretic forms, the argument is non-explicit, unless an additional
preposition is used. Similarly, proper nouns such as Charles Darwin and Lufthansa have no overt case marking and are
therefore non-explicit if not accompanied by a preposition.
Metaphor: “yes” vs. “no”. Expressions may be used figuratively, i.e. an abstract concept is designated by means of a word
referring to a concrete object, e.g. Die Kirche ist zu den Menschen gesandt ‘The church has been sent to the people’. Reference
is made to a concrete sending event to express the abstract idea that the institute church has been founded to help the
people.
THEME Collocation: “high”, “low”, “no”. Collocation strength of verb and THEME according to the logDice for the 100 most
important collocations (cf. Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS: https://www.dwds.de/)). The logDice is a
stable, non-corpus-specific association score between the lexical item and the verb (cf. Rychlý, 2008). A one unit increase in
logDice indicates a doubling of the collocation frequency. We found logDices ranging from 3.5 to 10.5. Unfortunately, not all
lexical items represented in our data are listed in the DWDS frequency lists. We were able to annotate 605 of the 1343
THEMEs for schicken and 717 of the 1346 for senden. Given the large number of missing values and the skewed nature of the
logDice distribution, we decided to bin the scores into three categories. The category “no” was used for the THEMES for which
there was no logDice available. “Low” was given to all positive scores up to 7, “high” to logDice scores larger than 7. We used
logDice rather than other possible collocational measurements because the score is readily retrievable from the DWDS
library. We did not compute the collocational measurement based on our data. The latter would be impossible given that
only a limited number of observations can be retrieved from the corpus. The logDice that we used is based on a full corpus
and is therefore considered a more valid collocation estimate than the one that we could calculate based on small
subsamples.
Length Difference is operationalized as length of RECIPIENT in number of words (excluding the preposition an or zu) minus
length of THEME in number of words.
Origin: “D”, “AT”, “CH”, “W”, indicates whether the data source is German, Austrian, Swiss or Wikipedia. Some caution is
required with regard to this variable. For instance, a German newspaper may borrow news and messages from a news agency
located elsewhere, e.g. in Switzerland.
As a final note regarding our data annotation, it bears pointing out that we did not annotate whether the same con-
struction was used in the previous context, a phenomenon variously termed “syntactic priming” (cf. Szmrecsanyi, 2006),
“structural parallelism” or “syntactic persistence” (cf. Bock, 1986; Pickering et al., 2002; Gries, 2005; Bresnan and Ford, 2010).
The reason is that for many instances the preceding context is non-existent in our corpus (e.g., when the token is the first
sentence of an article) or is too impoverished to contain any priming structure.
3.3. Data analysis
With respect to the first research question, which concerns the constructional variation between IOC and POC with
schicken and senden in present-day German, we compare the relative frequencies of the constructional variants with
the two verbs under analysis with a chi-squared test. To evaluate the effect of the predictor variables on the occurrence
of either constructional variant (POC vs. IOC) (research question 2), we first fitted a logistic regression model. We used
R (R Core Team, 2017), and more specifically Harrel's (2017) rms-package. As for model building, we included all factors
without interactions. Following Harrel (2017), no model simplification was performed. All categorical factors are
dummy coded. To reduce potential overfitting, we applied penalisation, using the pentrace function in the rms package.
We interpret the estimated effects by means of effect plots. Further details of the estimated model can be found in
Appendix 1.
We also looked at the alternation between an-POC and zu-POC, which gives a triadic alternation (IOC vs. an-POC vs. zu-
POC). To evaluate the effects of the 23 factors under analysis, we fitted a conditional inference tree (CIT) using the ctree
function from the party package (Strobl et al., 2008). We used the plotted tree to interpret the results of the model. Although a
multinomial model would also be possible here, given the triadic outcome, we decided to revert to a conditional inference
tree because the outcome is severely unbalanced, with 1091 observations for an-POC, 1326 for IOC, but only 272 for zu-POC. If
we use the rule of thumb of 20 observations per variable to have sufficient power, we would require at least 400 observations
as the minimum number. The skewed distribution is not problematic for a classification tree model, which makes no
distributional assumptions. Moreover, the interpretation of the results of the tree model are more readily interpretable than
the effect plots for a multinomial regression model.
4. Results
4.1. Constructional variation
The results of the random searches for dataset one yield the following results with respect to the frequency of the
constructional variants: 24% (94/400) of schicken and 36% (143/400) of the uses of senden are ditransitive (i.e. IOC or POC).
Most sentences with schicken and senden are directional sentences with prepositions such as in, nach, auf, but also zu and an.
Recall that in the present study, a sentence with an- and zu-POC is only retained if it is an alternative to a ditransitive sentence
with IOC.
As Table 1 shows, with schicken, POC is slightly preferred over IOC (60%), with a 95% CI of 49.5% to 69%. Nearly all POCs
take an as a preposition (86%). POC is also strongly preferred with senden (84%), with a 95% CI of 77% to 89%. The association
is highly significant based on a chi squared test (X2 ¼ 16, df ¼ 1, P-value < 0.0001). The confidence intervals indicate that
senden has a stronger tendency to be used with POC than schicken. Moreover, an-POC is again the preferred prepositional
variant.
Table 1
Ditransitive realisations of schicken and senden
Construction
IOC POC an-POC zu-POC

schicken 38 (40%) 56 (60%) 48 (86%) 8 (14%)
senden 23 (16%) 120 (84%) 117 (97%) 3 (3%)
The question now arises how to account not only for the variation observed in the IOC/POC alternation with schicken and
senden, which are commonly considered to be near-synonym verbs, but also for the prepositional variation between an and zu
in the POC variant. This is the subject of the next section.
4.2. IOC/POC alternation
4.2.1. Word order

IOC and POC have preferred word orders in the normal declarative clause. The most frequent word order of IOC is RECIPIENT-
THEME (R-T), whereas it is THEME-RECIPIENT (T-R) for POC. However, instances with other word orders appear to be considerably
more frequent with schicken and senden than those reported for geben in De Vaere et al. (2018). The distribution of the word
orders is shown in Table 2. Note that R-T in this table also refers to topicalized instances.
Table 2
Contingency table between word order and construction in the geben and the schicken and senden dataset.
Construction
Order IOC POC

geben R-T (N ¼ 681) 680 (99.85%) 1 (0.0015%)
(N ¼ 1301) T-R (N ¼ 620) 32 (5%) 588 (95%)
schicken/senden R-T (N ¼ 1202) 1134 (94%) 68 (6%)
(N ¼ 2689) T-R (N ¼ 1487) 192 (13%) 1295 (87%)
geben X2 ¼ 1141, df ¼ 1, P-value < 0.0001. Cramér’s V ¼ 0.95.

schicken/senden X2 ¼ 1760, df ¼ 1, P-value < 0.0001. Cramér’s V ¼ 0.81.
With schicken and senden R-T order is observed in IOC in 94% of the cases, whereas T-R order occurs mainly (87%) in POC
(compare 99,99% R-T in IOC and 95% T-R with geben, De Vaere et al. (2018: 16)). Based on Cramér's V, an estimate of the strength
of the association, the association between Order and Construction is stronger for geben (Cramér's V ¼ 0.95), than for schicken
and senden (Cramér's V ¼ 0.81) (cf. Table 2). Hence, although there is a strong association between IOC and R-T order and POC
Fig. 1. Ranking of apparent importance of predictors based on ANOVA of nested models7.
and T-R order with the verbs schicken and senden in present-day German, the association does not hold to the extent found
with the verb geben. With regard to IOC in particular it could be questioned whether R-T should be considered the unmarked
word order, as 13% T-R is arguably not infrequent.
4.2.2. IOC vs. POC (with both prepositions)

Based on our logistic regression model, we have evidence for the effect of 12 factors. With respect to the quality of the
model, internal validation using bootstrap validation indicates very good predictive quality (bootstrapping means
resampling with replacement). Bias-corrected Somer's Dxy equals 0.81 (which is equal to a bootstrapped C-index of 0.90).
Other validation indexes (see table in Appendix) do not show signs of overoptimism, which suggests that overfitting is not
problematic.
We checked for possible collinearity by examining the VIFs (as reported by the vif() function in the rms-package). The VIFs
suggest some collinearity between Subsense, TransferSense and Concreteness of Theme. Refitting models by excluding either
Concreteness of Theme or Transfer sense had negligible effects in comparison with the model; TransferSense did not become
significant after dropping Concreteness of Theme and Subsense remained significant, Concreteness of Theme and Subsense
remained significant after dropping TransferSense. Collinearity did not affect the interpretation of the effects observed in our
model.
In order of importance the significant factors are: (1) Pronominality of RECIPIENT, (2) Animacy of RECIPIENT, (3) Voice, (4)
Subsense, (5) Length Difference, (6) Givenness of RECIPIENT, (7) Concreteness of the THEME, (8) Origin, (9) Definiteness of THEME,
(10) Topicalization, (11) Number of RECIPIENT, (12) Syncretism of RECIPIENT. The relative contribution of each predictor to the
model fit is displayed in Fig. 1.
7
The following abbreviations are used: RecPron ¼ Pronominality of RECIPIENT, RecAnim ¼ Animacy of RECIPIENT, LengthDiff ¼ Length Difference, RecGiv ¼
Givenness of RECIPIENT, ThemeConc ¼ Concreteness of THEME, ThemeDef ¼ Definiteness of THEME, Topic ¼ Topicalization, RecNum ¼ Number of RECIPIENT, RecSync
¼ Syncretism of RECIPIENT, RecProper ¼ Propernounhood of RECIPIENT, RecDef ¼ Definiteness of RECIPIENT, ThemeGiv ¼ Givenness of THEME, ThemeColl ¼
Collocational strength of THEME and verb, ThemeAnim ¼ Animacy of THEME, ThemePron ¼ Pronominality of THEME.
Fig. 1 suggests that RECIPIENT pronominality and RECIPIENT animacy yield the strongest effect. Fig. 2 displays the effect plots
associated with each variable. The y-axis represents the predicted probability of POC, the x-axis the different levels of the
predictor variables.
Fig. 2. Effect plots for the schicken/senden dataset8.
Overall, IOC is positively associated with active voice, the subsenses C (object), E (religious), F (meteorological) and G
(financial), RECIPIENTs that are shorter than THEMEs, pronominal, individual, given, topicalized, singular and explicit RECIPIENTs,
abstract or propositional, indefinite THEMEs, and sentences from Swiss sources. By contrast, the following factors have a
positive effect on POC: passive voice, the subsense D (person) (observe, however, the large confidence interval), concrete and
definite THEMEs, and longer RECIPIENTs than THEMEs, nominal, collective, dual reference and object RECIPIENTs. New and accessible
RECIPIENTs also have a positive effect on POC in comparison to given RECIPIENTs, and so have plural and non-explicit RECIPIENTs in
comparison to singular and explicit arguments.
Below, we provide some typical examples of POC (13), (14) and IOC (15), (16) with both verbs according to the quantitative
findings.
(13) Es wird [ein Signal] <an das BMW-Callcenter> gesendet.

that be.PASS a.ACC signal to the.ACC BMW-call center send.PTCP
‘A signal is sent to the BMW-call center.’
8
Clarification of the abbreviations in the effect plots: acc ¼ accessible, abstrc ¼ abstract, concrt ¼ concrete, prpstn ¼ propositional, anim ¼ animate, coll
¼ collective, ind ¼ individual, dualref ¼ dual reference, obj ¼ object. ThemeColl ¼ Theme collocation strength.
(Nominal, dual reference RECIPIENT, passive voice, subsense H (technical), longer

RECIPIENT than THEME, accessible RECIPIENT, concrete THEME, origin D, no topicalization
– predicted probability ¼ 98% POC)
(14) Hingegen könnten [Betroffene] <zum Fürsorgeamt>

by contrast can.SUBJ victims.ACC to the.DAT welfare office
geschickt werden.
send.PTCP be.PASS
‘On the other hand victims could be sent to the welfare office.’
(Nominal, dual reference RECIPIENT, passive voice, subsense D (person),
concrete THEME, no topicalization – predicted probability ¼ 97 % POC)
(15) Gott hat <uns> [dieses geschickt.

Wunder]
God have. we. this.ACC send.
PRS DAT miracle PTCP
‘God has sent us this miracle.’
(Pronominal, individual RECIPIENT, active voice, subsense E (religious), shorter RECIPIENT than THEME, abstract THEME – predicted probability ¼ 98% IOC)
(16) <Dieser sendet man [einen

Person > Gruß].
this.DAT send. one a.ACC
person PRS greeting
‘To this person one sends a greeting.’
(individual RECIPIENT, active voice, propositional, indefinite THEME, given, topicalized, explicit, singular RECIPIENT, Swiss origin – predicted probability ¼ 65 % IOC)
4.2.3. IOC vs. an-POC vs. zu-POC

The factors correlating with the alternation IOC versus an-POC and zu-POC were investigated by means of a conditional
inference tree. The results, presented in Fig. 3, indicate in the first node that subsense D (person) is associated to zu-POC in
case the RECIPIENT is nominal, and to IOC, but also in a lesser extent to zu-POC, when the RECIPIENT is pronominal.
Fig. 3. Conditional inference tree for IOC vs. an-POC and zu-POC.
The statistics clearly show that an-POC is never used with the subsense D (person), i.e. when persons are sent to other
persons. An-POC occurs in all the other subsenses with preferably nominal RECIPIENTs, whereas IOC is the preferred variant with
pronominal RECIPIENTs. This result corroborates the previous finding that IOC is the preferred variant with pronominal RECIPIENTs
and shows that when the sentence refers to the event of one person being sent to another person, the only possible realisation
seems to be zu-POC, unless the THEME is pronominal.
5. Discussion
In this section we first discuss the factors that are statistically significant in the quantitative analysis (5.1). We then zoom in
on the role of the third argument in the ditransitive construction (i.e. the ADDRESSEE as instantiation of the RECIPIENT with the
verbs schicken and senden) (5.2). Finally, we explore what our findings can tell us about constructionhood in general (5.3).
5.1. Significant factors
The earliest multifactorial dative alternation study in English using quantitative modelling of corpus data in a construc-
tional approach is Gries (2003b). It succeeds in identifying the prototypical instances of both DOC and POC from corpus data
(by means of a quantitative method called linear discriminant analysis (LDA)). Although the main interest of the study, which is
embedded in a prototype approach, is speakers’ choice, the findings are largely corroborated by our analysis in that Gries
(2003b: 19) identifies approximately the same variables as having the highest discriminatory power and hints at Har-
monic Alignment.
“Harmonic Alignment” (HA) is a tendency in the English dative alternation observed by Bresnan and Ford (2010: 181). It is
a statistical pattern that allows them to predict that animate, definite, pronominal, given, shorter arguments tend to precede
inanimate, indefinite, nominal, non-given and longer arguments. This tendency was also observed for the ditransitive
alternation in German with the verb geben by De Vaere et al. (2018). In De Vaere et al. (2018) only two word orders were
investigated, given that there is a strong correlation of IOC with RECIPIENT-THEME order and of POC with THEME-RECIPIENT order with
this particular verb. By contrast, with schicken and senden IOC also often occurs with THEME-RECIPIENT order, and POC is to a lesser
extent, also attested with RECIPIENT-THEME order (cf. section 4.2.1).
Some of our findings support this principle9, and we see tendencies towards HA in e.g. Length Difference, i.e. short ar-
guments tend to occur before long ones. For IOC, this means that short RECIPIENTs, usually pronouns, precede long THEMEs in
RECIPIENT-THEME order, whereas short THEMEs, also usually pronouns, precede long RECIPIENTs in THEME-RECIPIENT order. This finding is
consistent with Behaghel's well-established ‘Law of increasing constituents’ (Behaghel, 1909, 1932). This law can also be
observed in POC when short THEMEs precede long (usually nominal) RECIPIENTs in THEME-RECIPIENT order.
Furthermore, the analysis shows that factors such as Concreteness of THEME and Number of RECIPIENT, along with a handful of
other factors not investigated by Bresnan and Ford (2010) such as Voice, Subsense, Origin, Topicalization and Syncretism of
RECIPIENT, play a statistically significant role in the alternation with the German verbs schicken and senden, suggesting that the
alternation comes about as the result of the simultaneous operation of multiple factors not necessarily related to HA. Apart
from that, our study supports the conclusion of nearly every corpus-based multifactorial constituent order alternation that
the alternation cannot be explained solely on semantic grounds, e.g. Gries (2003b); Bresnan and Ford (2010); Theijssen
(2012); Röthlisberger et al. (2017) on the dative alternation in English, Gries and Wullf (2013) on the genitive alternation
in German and Chinese ESL learners, Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi (2018) on particle placement in varieties of English, inter
alia.
The finding that passive voice is associated with POC is consistent with De Vaere et al.’s (2018) finding concerning the
correlation of passive voice and POC with geben. We surmise that the strong correlation between ditransitive passive sen-
tences and POC may be connected with considerations of morphosyntactic transparency (which have been shown to play a
role in argument structure comprehension, cf. e.g. Czypionka et al. (2017)). The passive construction is normally realised in
the form of two-argument clauses with the AGENT left unexpressed (92% of the passive tokens in our dataset, i.e. 275/298: 30/
35 in IOC, 245/263 in POC). This means that the two arguments are THEME and RECIPIENT, not AGENT and THEME as in the normal
monotransitive active sentence. Given that the RECIPIENT may not be overtly case-marked in the dative (which is the case with
bare nouns, 1st and 2nd person plural pronouns and many proper nouns), the coding of the RECIPIENT as a PP is a means to
morphosyntactically further differentiate a two-argument sentence that actually represents a ditransitive three-argument
construction in a reduced form from a monotransitive two-argument construction with the default clausal arguments
10
AGENT and THEME. A similar explanation in a reverse sense seems plausible, albeit to a lesser extent, with regard to the finding
that sentences with topicalized RECIPIENT tend to correlate with IOC (82% of the tokens, i.e. 47/57 IOC, 10/57 POC). A clause-
initial PP is often an adverbial in German active clauses, while the first argument in an oblique case in a three-argument
construction is immediately recognizable as a non-subject argument. Given that instances with topicalized RECIPIENT in our
dataset as a rule have three expressed arguments (100% of the tokens, i.e. 57/57), and all other interacting factors being equal,
the use of POC may be less favoured on morphosyntactic grounds in clauses with topicalized RECIPIENT as compared, e.g., to
passive sentences. In a similar vein, one reason for the association in our data of explicit RECIPIENTs with IOC and of non-explicit
RECIPIENTs with POC may be that language users are inclined to make explicit the syntactic role of non-explicit arguments by
using an unambiguous PP.
9
Because we also included topicalized arguments in the dataset, an anonymous reviewer points out that in sentences with topicalized inanimate THEMES
features like definiteness and givenness could override the impact of animacy, which should however not necessarily be a problem for Harmonic
Alignment.
10
Additional evidence for this analysis comes from the observation, long established in the literature on German syntax, that the uncommon Double
Object Construction in German with its neutral alignment (i.e., two object arguments in the accusative) tends to be replaced by an Indirect Object Con-
struction with indirective alignment in the passive (cf. Duden, 2016: x 1488).
The findings regarding the factor Subsense suggest that there are a number of semantic differences between the
constructional variants if the meanings of the two verbs with regard to their qualitative valency (the meaning of the argu-
ments) are taken into account. The subsenses “information: dual reference” (A: 46%), “information: content” (B: 16%) and
“object” (C: 19%) cover 81% of the data. Schicken is slightly favoured for (A) and (C) transfer, whereas senden is the preferred
verb for the transfer of informational content (B). Moreover, senden is strongly preferred to express the religious subsense (E),
mainly in IOC and zu-POC. Although only marginally frequent, the meteorological subsense (F) is solely confined to schicken in
IOC; the financial subsense (G) is mostly observed with schicken in IOC. Whereas the technical subsense (H) is strongly
connected to senden, the activity subsense (I) is exclusively observed with senden; the person subsense (D) favours schicken.
Finally, the conditional inference tree analysis in Section 4.2.3 indicates that the subsense involving the transfer of a person to
another person is strongly favoured with zu-POC.
Note that IOC is correlated to Swiss sources, which points to significant regional variation. However, because newspaper
agencies often borrow messages from across the German speaking world, the text source in DeReKo (Germany, Austria and
Switzerland) might not be a completely reliable indication (cf. De Vaere et al., 2018).
Finally, the result that concrete THEMEs are associated with POC seems to contradict the finding that subsense C (object),
which refers to the transfer of concrete objects, is associated with IOC. However, it should be kept in mind that concrete
THEMEs, apart from being objects, can also be individuals, so that this effect does not need to be contradictory and even squares
with the finding that the subsense D (person) is associated with POC.
5.2. The third argument
We now turn to the discussion of the “third argument” of the ditransitive construction, the syntactic locus of the alter-
nation under study. “Third argument” refers to a functional category, not word order. We follow valency grammar and
construe the ditransitive construction as consisting of a verb and three arguments according to the following hierarchical
order: AGENT (subject), THEME (first object, Direct Object) and RECIPIENT (second object, Indirect Object), (cf. Tesnière, 2015;
Malchukov et al., 2010). In constructional accounts (with an analysis usually starting from the English DOC with its neutral
alignment, cf. Section 1), the RECIPIENT argument is sometimes called “first object” because it is realized directly following the
verb in DOC. We do not adopt this terminology given the already mentioned differences between the DOC/POC alternation in
English and the IOC/POC alternation in a case language such as German. Syntactically, the third argument emerges as an
Indirect Object. It is either expressed in the dative case or by means of a PP.
Based on typological studies (Malchukov et al., 2010; Bickel, 2011), we subsume the different roles the third argument can
take under the macrorole GOAL. This is because it is necessary to define the RECIPIENT role in such a way as to ensure that the IOC/
POC alternation with the verbs schicken and senden is covered to its full extent. The GOAL argument of the ditransitive con-
struction type we are investigating with the verbs schicken and senden can be realised as two different semantic roles, viz.
either as a RECIPIENT-like argument that is an ADDRESSEE or as a RECIPIENT-like argument that partly realises a DESTINATION. According to
Malchukov et al. (2010: 20), the most frequent type of a ditransitive construction is the one with an animate RECIPIENT and an
inanimate THEME. Accordingly, in most instances a person or group of persons (often designated by a proper name) proto-
typically receives an object. Although it is generally assumed that a construction should have a sentient RECIPIENT in order to
qualify as ditransitive, our corpus data reveal that with regard to German a wider array of animate and inanimate THEMEs and
RECIPIENTs have to be taken into account.
A number of remarks are in order. First of all, with schicken and senden the role we call ADDRESSEE is a potential RECIPIENT of a
‘send’ transfer that is mostly of the concrete or propositional type. In this article we have used the term ADDRESSEE to refer to the
semantic role realized with the verbs schicken and senden and continue to use RECIPIENT (short for RECIPIENT-like argument) to
refer to the slot of the third argument in the ditransitive construction in general. Second, in line with the typological literature
we do not subsume an argument structure with a benefactive under the ditransitive construction despite their similarity. As
noted by Malchukov et al. (2010: 2), the argument structure with a benefactive is closely related to the ditransitive con-
struction because the BENEFICIARY argument is expressed in the same way as a RECIPIENT, as in (17):
(17) Spiel mir das Lied vom Tode.

‘Play the song of the death for me [German translation of Once Upon a Time in the West].’
However, in a sentence such as (18), the verb's inherent lexical semantics (‘senden-transfer’) is compatible with either of
two interpretations: he (‘ihm’) can be the RECIPIENT of the telegrams or merely the BENEFICIARY of the sending event. Hence, the
role can remain ambiguous with verbs of transfer such as schicken and senden as well.
(18) Fans sandten <ihm> [Telegramme] ins Spital.

‘Fans sent (for) him telegrams to the hospital.’
Third, sentences such as (19) and (20) with an inanimate GOAL which denotes a DESTINATION do not qualify as ditransitive
constructions.
(19) Die Botschaft wird als DVD <an die Elbe> geschickt.
‘The message is sent to the Elbe as a DVD.’
(20) Die Polizei schickte einen Streifenwagen <zu der Adresse>.

‘The police sent a patrol car to the address.’
However, not all inanimate GOALs can automatically be excluded from the dataset. Inanimate ADDRESSEEs such as Schule
‘school’, Verlag ‘publishing company’ or Druckerei ‘printing office’ have a special status because they can either refer to the
organisation or the group of persons working there. Similarly, Gehirn ‘brain’, Faxanschluss ‘fax connection’, Handgerät
‘handheld device’ can refer to the object or its location. These NPs are therefore classified as ‘dual reference’ or, more spe-
cifically, as instantiating the role of ADDRESSEE-DESTINATION in terms of a complex semantic role (cf. Kittilä (2005) for other
complex semantic roles such as RECIPIENT-BENEFICIARY).
Inanimate ADDRESSEEs that are objects, e.g. PC ‘computer’, Fernseher ‘television’, Handy ‘mobile phone’, occur sporadically
with schicken but are more frequent with senden. They relate to the technical subsense senden often displays in POC. In (21)
the inanimate GOAL constitutes an inanimate ADDRESSEE, in this case an object that is a technical device. The sentence belongs to
those sentences with inanimate and dual reference ADDRESSEEs that partake in the alternation, compare e.g. (22), (23) and (24).
They are therefore part of the dataset:
(21) Experten begannen damit, [Signale] <zu dem Vehikel> zu senden.

‘Experts started by sending signals to the vehicle.’
(22) Das Hormon Insulin sendet <dem Gehirn> [Sättigungssignale].

‘The hormone insulin sends the brain saturation signals.’
(23) Diese senden [Schmerzsignale] <an unser Gehirn>.

‘These send pain signals to our brain.’
(24) Es sendet [den Befehl “Finger wegziehen!”] <zu den Muskeln in Arm und Hand>.
‘It sends the command “withdraw fingers!” to the muscles in arm and hand.’
In the Supplement (Tables 4 and 5) we provide an overview of the ditransitive structures which are the object of the
analysis insofar as they partake in the IOC/POC alternation. They are organised according to the observed combinations of the
four key variables animate and inanimate THEMEs and animate and inanimate ADDRESSEEs (English translations are provided per
row in the footnotes). An analysis of the data according to the differentiation in Table 4 and Table 5 (in the Supplement) is
particularly helpful for an account of the observed constructional alternation. First of all, the corpus analysis reveals that the
animacy constraint, which is central to the English DOC according to Goldberg (2003: 221), needs to be relaxed with respect
to the German IOC. The animacy constraint “requires that the goal argument be an animate being, capable of receiving the
transferred item” (Goldberg, 2003: 221) and renders sentences such as ??Liza sent storage a book11 infelicitous. By contrast,
dual reference (25) and inanimate (26) ADDRESSEEs regularly occur in the German IOC:
(25) Der Unbekannte schickte <dem Rathaus> in einem Briefumschlag

the stranger send.IPFV the.DAT town hall in an envelope
[exakt 1341 Euro].
exactly 1341 Euro
‘The stranger sent the town hall exactly 1341 euro in an envelope.’
(26) Eine weitere Möglichkeit ist, <dem Fernseher> über eine DVD
another option be.PRS the.DAT TV via a DVD
[ein weißes Vollbild] zu senden.
a.ACC full-screen white to send.INF
‘Another option is to send the TV via a DVD a full-screen white.’
Moreover, whereas in most traditional accounts dual reference and object ADDRESSEEs are ignored, left undiscussed or
considered exceptions, our study indicates that it is necessary to expand the study of syntactic alternation in German to non-
sentient ADDRESSEEs in order to encompass all the observed cases of alternation.
Finally, recall that we apply the narrow definition of construction (Section 1). In this regard we concur with Stefanowitsch
(2011: 375) who also favours the narrow definition of construction in which frequent occurrence or entrenchment of an
argument structure does not function as a criterion for constructionhood, irrespective of one's general theoretical framework.
Moreover, there seems to be no reliable cut-off point to determine how frequent a compositionally derivable structure has to
occur in order to get recognized as a construction according to the broad definition.
11
An anonymous reviewer remarks that this constraint may not be as categorical in English as stated by Goldberg (2003) and cites sources such as
Bresnan et al. (2007), Ozón (2009) and Tagliamonte (2015) who show that inanimate recipients are attested, even if they are marked.
5.3. Constructionhood
Let us now revert to the animacy constraint on IOC discussed in the previous section. In German, too, RECIPIENT animacy is
one of the most significant factors contributing to the alternation. However, we showed that RECIPIENT animacy is not a cat-
egorical constraint on IOC, given that it is defeasible. We therefore argue that the animacy constraint with respect to the
RECIPIENT is not an inherent property of the constructional meaning but rather a feature of one of the possible – and arguably
one of the preferred – senses of the IOC variant that have their basis in a general constructional meaning. The conclusion that
IOC exhibits a strong preference towards animate RECIPIENTS is in line with an important observation by Wegener (1985: 285)
who in her book on the German dative qualifies the seemingly “inherent” (German inhärent) feature ‘animacy’ as eine überaus
starke Präferenz ‘a very strong preference’ of the dative case. This means that it is not an encoded feature (Wegener, 1985:
286). Based on our empirical findings, we conclude that similarly the strong preference of IOC for animate RECIPIENTs is not an
encoded feature of the IOC variant but an inferred sense that is conventionalized in the sense of a generalized conversational
implicature (Levinson, 2000: 15, 20).
Moreover, we observe that animacy of the RECIPIENT is not an exclusive feature of IOC, as animate RECIPIENTS can also occur in
POC. We showed that in German, compared to the English alternation, two different prepositional variants have to be
considered with schicken and senden, viz. an-POC and zu-POC. When animate THEMES are sent to animate RECIPIENTS in POC, it is
without exception the zu-POC variant that is used. The other combinations, viz. inanimate THEMES to animate RECIPIENTS,
inanimate THEMES to inanimate RECIPIENTS, occur both in an-POC and zu-POC. The data indicate that an-POC and zu-POC are not
generally interchangeable but differ with regard to specific uses that tend to correlate either with an or with zu. However, the
strong preference to use zu-POC to designate the sending of an animate THEME to an animate RECIPIENT is no encoded feature of
zu-POC. Not only can the same function be expressed by using IOC, in particular when the RECIPIENT is pronominal, but zu-POC is
also used for other functions, e.g. when the PP designates a DESTINATION.
When it comes to preferential differences between IOC and POC, the contribution of the lexical semantics of the arguments
needs to be taken into account properly. In particular, the animacy restriction with respect to the RECIPIENT is a property of the
lexical item that fills the third argument slot of the construction. However, the probabilistic analysis we offered shows that the
difference between IOC and POC is not a matter of semantics only. By situating the alternation in a typological perspective and
by adopting the concept of dual reference, the probabilistic approach gives an estimate of a whole range of motivating factors
that are associated with the alternation. On the other hand, the interacting factors operate when the constructional slots are
filled with lexical material and hence relate to the levels of the senses and subsenses we have distinguished. We therefore
advocate an analysis in which both variants are variants of a more general, underdetermined AGENT-THEME-GOAL construction
which is a form-meaning pairing in its own right, but in which the third argument slot is left underspecified as to whether it
will be realized as a dative NP or a PP (an accusative or zu dative) and with regard to the specifics of its lexical semantics (cf.
Willems et al., 2019).
Following Cappelle (2006: 18) and Perek (2015: 156) we call the underdetermined AGENT-THEME-GOAL construction we adopt
in the analysis a “constructeme”, which in present-day German has two variants that are so-called “allostructions”. The
prepositional allostruction in turn has variants, of which the variants with an and zu are of particular importance for the
present study. Cappelle and Perek define a constructeme as a “generalisation” over two or more allostructions that inherit the
properties of the constructeme. However, these authors embed their analysis of alternating structures in a monostratal
approach of language which is typical of current Construction Grammar. In contrast to transformational grammars, in which
one alternating structure is usually explained as a derivation of another, the monostratal approach does not distinguish
different levels of analysis. It instead pairs linguistic forms directly with meaning, which however encompasses both encoded
meaning, inferred sense and encyclopaedic knowledge (cf. Coene and Willems, 2006; Willems and Coene, 2006; Höllein,
2019). While we agree with the criticism of the transformational approach, we believe that a monostratal approach is ill-
suited to account for the empirical findings of our study. The data seem better accommodated under a conceptualization
of the constructeme based on a distinction between the semantics of the construction and its pragmatics. With “semantics”
we refer to encoded meaning, i.e. the inherent properties of the constructeme; with “pragmatics” we refer to inferred senses,
i.e. the conventionalized but defeasible interpretations of the allostructions. This means that we regard the constructeme as
encoded in the language system, whereas the allostructions that instantiate it are its variant realisations with additional
pragmatic features as they can be found in the corpus. However, it is important to point out that these latter pragmatic
features are not random, they are in part conventionalized, viz. they possess recurrent conventional features on the level of
normal language use (Coseriu, 1985, 1987; Levinson, 2000). For instance, the fact that IOC is usually realised with an animate
RECIPIENT (e.g. dieser Person (16), dem Kunden (42), etc.) is a conventionalised property of this allostruction. By contrast, the fact
that e.g. collective and dual reference RECIPIENTS (Kloster (3), Redaktion (35), etc.) preferably occur in POC is a conventionalised
property of this allostruction. Under this view, the allostructions IOC and POC are constructional variants of the general AGENT-
THEME-GOAL constructeme which get their formal and pragmatic features from the simultaneous operation of the lexical items
that instantiate the constructeme, i.e. the central valency-bearing verb and the lexical items of the arguments. This has
important consequences for our approach to constructionhood. Because we argue that IOC and POC are no constructions in
their own right, we do not ascribe the ‘caused possession’ meaning and the ‘caused motion’ meaning to either IOC or POC, nor
do we ascribe these meanings to the verbs that occur in both constructional variants. On the basis of the variation we
encounter in the data we claim, unlike Perek (2015: 156), that the ‘caused possession’ meaning does not apply to the con-
structeme either. The schematic meaning of the AGENT-THEME-GOAL constructeme is more general, i.e. “underspecified”, to use
the term proposed in theoretical work on the semantics/pragmatics interface (Levinson, 2000; Willems, 2011; Carston, 2012),
among others.12 This general meaning applies to all instantiations of both allostructions, including those instances that do not
express possession.
Moreover, in line with De Vaere et al. (2018) we surmise that also the verbs have a general, underspecified meaning on the
semantic level, which is realized in sentences with additional lexical and pragmatic contents conveyed by the sentence ar-
guments (and other lexical material in the sentence). However, the general meaning of the central valency-bearing verbs is by
no means an empty box. This is evident from the fact that, e.g., the meanings of schicken and senden are specifically in contrast
with the general meaning of the verb geben, on the one hand, and with such morphologically complex verbs as weiterschicken,
zurückschicken, versenden etc. on the other. Whereas geben appears to encode a general transfer event which is not further
specified (cf. De Vaere et al., 2018), the transfer meanings of schicken and senden encode the feature ‘medium’ or ‘carrier’, as in
(35) Er schickt ein Foto an unsere Redaktion, e.g. by ordinary mail, e-mail etc. Sometimes the medium or carrier is made explicit,
as in (28) Die Medikamente werden der Klinik per Kurier geschickt.
An important insight that emerges from our analysis is that the semantics of the AGENT-THEME-GOAL construction has to be
delimited in such a way as to ensure that realisations of the GOAL argument that are strictly DESTINATIONS also fall under its scope.
This is demanded by the data we analysed. We saw that the allostruction POC covers ADDRESSEE realisations such as einen Brief
an die Eltern schicken ‘send a letter to the parents’ but also purely directional realisations such as Soldaten an den Rhein
schicken ‘send soldiers to the river Rhine’. Recall that the allostruction POC is not restricted to an- or zu-PPs but also occurs
with in-, auf- and nach-PPs, and we found evidence that even zu- and an-PPs may express DESTINATIONS. However, although the
AGENT-THEME-GOAL construction can give rise to purely directional POC sentences, these do not qualify as ditransitive because
they instantiate the GOAL role as DESTINATION pure and simple and do not alternate with IOC. Purely directional POC sentences
therefore do not fall within the scope of the present study.
The approach developed above has several advantages. On the theoretical side, it shows that insights of Construction
Grammar, valency theory, language typology and a layered approach to meaning which insists on the difference between
semantics and pragmatics not only are compatible but also mutually supporting and can account for the full range of variation
we observe in our dataset. On the empirical side, the approach provides, first of all, an illustration of how the notion of
(argument structure) construction can be operationalized without resorting to frequency as a prerequisite for con-
structionhood, as in Goldberg's (2006: 5) definition (cf. Stefanowitsch, 2011). We adopt the view that the narrow definition of
construction (Goldberg, 1995: 4) is better suited to accommodate the data, not only because it is more parsimonious and not
dependent on the troublesome notion of frequency (and, by extension, entrenchment and mental representation), but also
because the narrow definition of construction is eminently compatible with a layered approach of meaning based on the
distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Secondly, there is no need in our account to turn to “metaphorical extensions”
whenever specific data does not confirm to the putative meanings of constructional variants. For example, instances of POC
that express ‘caused possession’ rather than ‘caused motion’ are explained by Goldberg (1995: 90) by means of a metaphorical
link to a ‘Transfer Caused Motion Construction’, e.g. Joe gave his house to the Moonies. In more recent constructionist accounts
of the English dative alternation, (e.g. Perek, 2015), this analysis has been questioned. In our German data we encountered a
considerable number of POC-sentences (e.g. (4) Netz sandte eine SMS an seine Sekretärin and (33) Florian schickte einen Brief an
die Eltern) that come close to express what has been paraphrased as ‘a volitional agent transfers an object to a willing
recipient’, which is the central sense of the English DOC according to Goldberg (1995: 33, 151). However, instead of taking
recourse to an explanation in terms of a metaphorical extension called “Transfer of Ownership as physical transfer” (cf.
Goldberg, 1995: 89), we analyse such instances differently. We claim that these sentences instantiate the allostruction POC,
more specifically the an-POC alternant, which is itself a variant of the AGENT-THEME-GOAL construction (the “constructeme”)
which is a schematic form-meaning pairing with a more general meaning. Hence, ‘caused possession’ is an inferred sense the
allostruction can express, not an encoded meaning. Finally, our approach readily accounts for cases that are commonly treated
as exceptions in other accounts, including sentences with inanimate RECIPIENTs, e.g. dem Gehirn (22) and dem Fernseher (26), in
which no coercion into the category of animate RECIPIENTs takes place.
6. Conclusions
This article focused on three research objectives. The first aim was to chart the extent of the constructional variation
between IOC and POC with the transfer verbs schicken and senden in present-day German. The second aim was to quantify the
various morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic and processing factors that correlate with the two constructional variants by
means of a large-scale corpus-based investigation. To this end we carried out a logistic regression analysis of ca. 2700 sen-
tences extracted from the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo). The third aim was to discuss the implications of the empirical
findings for the theory of argument structure constructions in general, in particular with regard to a construction's variation
in form and meaning.
The constructional variation we observe with schicken and senden is expected on the basis of the Ditransitivity Hierarchy
which predicts that the German ‘send’ verbs are likely to occur in both IOC and POC. However, we also found that about two
thirds of the naturally occurring sentences with schicken and senden are not ditransitive. Conversely, if used in a ditransitive
12
Evidence for underspecification has also been presented in psycholinguistic research (cf. Frisson, 2009, 2015).
sentence, both verbs occur more often in POC than in IOC, but overall senden occurs more often in POC than schicken. The
semantic range of schicken and senden is more restricted than geben (cf. De Vaere et al., 2018), as both verbs are mainly
realised in concrete and propositional transfer senses.
In search of the factors that correlate with one or both constructional variants, we found that both variants have preferred
word orders: RECIPIENT-THEME for IOC and THEME-RECIPIENT for POC. However, the main result of the statistical analysis is that a
principled analysis in terms of differentiations according to various types of AGENTs, THEMEs and RECIPIENTs brings us a long way
forward in accounting for the observed IOC/POC alternation with schicken and senden in present-day German. This is not
surprising given the role attributed in our account to an extensive set of potentially motivating factors, including morpho-
syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and processing factors that correlate with the two verbs in the two constructional variants.
IOC is mainly associated with pronominal and individual RECIPIENTs, whereas POC mainly occurs with nominal and collective
RECIPIENTs, dual reference RECIPIENTs and object RECIPIENTs. Whereas the first finding is in line with findings of previous probabilistic
research (e.g. Gries, 2003b: 13; Bresnan et al., 2007), the second finding points in another direction. Importantly, we introduced
the category of dual reference NPs to account for the variation observed in German. We found that ‘non-sentient ADDRESSEES’ also
partake in the alternation and observed extensions towards an ADDRESSEE-DESTINATION interpretation, so that the category of dual
reference creates a cline in recipienthood, ranging from effectively animate RECIPIENTs to non-sentient objects. The advantage of
adopting the overarching dual reference category in the analysis is that we do not need to exclude, or consider as exceptions,
non-prototypical instances in which it is unclear whether the third argument designates a RECIPIENT or a DESTINATION. The present
analysis departs from the traditional view that the animacy constraint on the RECIPIENT is an encoded feature of IOC (or even the
schematic constructeme). The animacy constraint is considered a strong preference of the dative NP in IOC, yet on the level of
the inferred sense the utterance (i.e. its pragmatics) conveys, not its encoded meaning (i.e. semantics).
Regarding the difference between the two POC alternants, we found that an-POC is preferred with nominal RECIPIENTs (as
opposed to pronominal RECIPIENTs) and that animate RECIPIENTs are excluded from an-POC but strongly correlate with zu-POC
when the THEME is also animate. Thus, according to our analysis, an-POC and zu-POC are two variants of POC which correlate
with different default subsenses of the POC variant.
Finally, with regard to the constructional meaning of the three-argument structure construction, it is important to
emphasize that with the verbs schicken and senden both constructional variants are observed with the same senses (in
particular concrete and propositional senses). However, differences between IOC and POC emerge at the level of the sub-
senses, e.g., the religious, meteorological and financial subsenses tend to occur more frequently in IOC than POC. Conversely,
the technical subsense is found most often in POC and the transfer of a person to another person most often in zu-POC.
According to Malchukov et al. (2010: 65), “it is not always obvious whether two expression variants should be regarded as
different constructions or as the same construction with some variability”. Our analysis suggests that with regard to IOC and
POC the latter is the case. The observed constructional variation between IOC and POC is not a matter of two constructions in
their own right but of two constructional variants of a single construction, which we termed the AGENT-THEME-GOAL construction
and which is unspecified with regard to the coding of the RECIPIENT-like argument (either in the dative case or as a PP). We
therefore adopt the term “allostructions” to refer to the two variants and “constructeme” to refer to the schematic
constructional pattern AGENT-THEME-GOAL (cf. Cappelle, 2006; Perek, 2015). The analysis we offered in this study thus corrob-
orates the narrow definition of a construction as a form-meaning pairing that allows for formal variation along the lines of,
e.g. Stefanowitsch (2011: 374–375). It is moreover in line with the important typological observation in Malchukov et al.
(2010: 1) that the formal manifestation of the arguments is not a defining criterion to identify a sentence as ditransitive.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful suggestions and comments on an earlier version
of this article.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101313.
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Constructional Variation With Two Near-Synonymous Verbs - The Case of Schicken and Senden in Present-Day German

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Constructional Variation With Two Near-Synonymous Verbs - The Case of Schicken and Senden in Present-Day German

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Language Sciences 83 (2021) 101313

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Constructional variation with two near-synonymous verbs:

(2) Dieter G. sandte <der Europäischen Fußball-Union> [eine deutliche Botschaft].

(3) Er sollte [die Gerichtsakten] nicht <an ihr Kloster> schicken.

(4) Netz sandte [eine SMS] <an seine Sekretärin>.

(6) Bürgermeister Rudolf Hakel hatte <an jeden Haushalt>

(7) Man kann ja nicht <zu jedem Taxifahrer>

(8) Stattdessen sende ich [es] dann <zu meiner Psychiaterin>.

3.1. Data collection

(9) Senden Sie <uns> [eine Mail] an mopokultur@mopo.de.

3.2. Data annotation

(11) Uns hat man keinen Notarzt geschickt,.

(12) <Bekannten> schickt er [SMS, die mit “heil” enden].

3.3. Data analysis

4.1. Constructional variation

IOC POC an-POC zu-POC

4.2. IOC/POC alternation

4.2.1. Word order

Order IOC POC

geben X2 ¼ 1141, df ¼ 1, P-value < 0.0001. Cramér’s V ¼ 0.95.

Fig. 1. Ranking of apparent importance of predictors based on ANOVA of nested models7.

4.2.2. IOC vs. POC (with both prepositions)

Fig. 2. Effect plots for the schicken/senden dataset8.

(13) Es wird [ein Signal] <an das BMW-Callcenter> gesendet.

(Nominal, dual reference RECIPIENT, passive voice, subsense H (technical), longer

(14) Hingegen könnten [Betroffene] <zum Fürsorgeamt>

(15) Gott hat <uns> [dieses geschickt.

(16) <Dieser sendet man [einen

4.2.3. IOC vs. an-POC vs. zu-POC

5.1. Signiﬁcant factors

5.2. The third argument

(17) Spiel mir das Lied vom Tode.

(18) Fans sandten <ihm> [Telegramme] ins Spital.

(20) Die Polizei schickte einen Streifenwagen <zu der Adresse>.

(21) Experten begannen damit, [Signale] <zu dem Vehikel> zu senden.

(22) Das Hormon Insulin sendet <dem Gehirn> [Sättigungssignale].

(23) Diese senden [Schmerzsignale] <an unser Gehirn>.

(25) Der Unbekannte schickte <dem Rathaus> in einem Briefumschlag

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101313.

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