Three Types of Alternation
Three Types of Alternation
There are three ways in which regular patterns of usage in a language alternate with one another: Lexical alternations, semantic-type alternations, and syntactic alternations. In general, alternations reflect differences in focus rather than differences in overall clause meaning and may be found with some words but not with other words. The chapter discusses the meaning potential of a word and alternations within norms and different aspects of word meaning, along with the most common types of syntactic alternation of English verbs, including active/passive alternation, causative/inchoative alternation, and indirect object alternation. It also considers reciprocal verbs and ellipsis as alternation, ellipsis of adverbials and prepositions, clausal ellipsis, and resultative constructions, and, finally, looks at a couple of examples where semantic alternations border on exploitations.
Keywords: usage, language, lexical alternations, semantic-type alternations, syntactic alternations, word meaning, reciprocal verbs, ellipsis, resultative constructions, exploitations
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