How can we determine at what level of abstraction lectal predictors operate? A case study of the alternation(s) between the Dutch direct and prepositional object

peer reviewed ; In syntactic alternation studies, the level of abstraction at which to investigate the variant distribution at issue is commonly determined a priori. For instance, the English conative alternation may be lexically delineated only by the preposition at, with the subject, verb and object slots in principle kept open (Perek 2015). In other occasions, an alternation may be limited to only the instances of a single verb and a single preposition, as in Pijpops et al. (2018), or researchers may focus on even more concrete lexical combinations, as in Lehmann and Schneider (2012). Still... Mehr ...