Constructional variation with two near-synonymous verbs: the case of schicken and senden in present-day German

This article reports on the results of a corpus-based study of alternating ditransitive argument structures comprising an AGENT-like, a THEME-like and a RECIPIENT-like argument in combination with the ditransitive verbs schicken and senden in present-day German. The alternation concerns the Indirect Object Construction with the ADDRESSEE (i.e. the RECIPIENT-like argument) expressed in the dative case (IOC) and the Prepositional Object Construction with the ADDRESSEE either introduced by the preposition an (+ accusative) or zu (+ dative) (POC). The quantitative analysis (logistic regression and Conditional Inference Tree) is based on N = 2689 naturally occurring sentences drawn from the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (IDS Mannheim). The article first presents a probabilistic account of the data that aims to predict the interplay of a wide array of morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic and processing factors. The problem with an exclusively semantic explanation of the alternation is that both IOC and POC can express the same senses. However, there are tendencies that relate IOC in particular to pronominal and individual ADDRESSEEs, whereas POC correlates more strongly with collective, dual reference and object ADDRESSEEs as well as passive voice. The article then proposes a typologically-informed account of the data that combines a constructional analysis with valency theory and a layered approach to the 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 underspecified GOAL argument in present-day German.