On the holistic effect in the locative alternation in English: A corpus-based study

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the English locative alternation, and it specifically focuses on the syntactic and semantic aspects of the type ‘spray/load alternation’, exemplified in sentences such as Sarah spread butter on the bread and Sarah spread the bread with butter. Secondly, this paper also presents a corpus-based study which aims to explore the holistic effect attributed to the with-variant through the analysis of the feature of definiteness in the direct object of the construction, as well as to conduct an online survey to observe native speakers’ assumptions on this subject.