Recent research (Gerwin, 2013; Siewierska & Hollmann, 2007; Yáñez Bouza & Denison,
2015) uses historical and contemporary corpora to quantify diachronic and spatial
distributions of variants of the ditransitive in British English. Each study pays
particular attention to ditransitives with two pronominal objects, where internal factors
influencing variation are reduced primarily to the choice of pronoun and verb
type. Three variants are attested, a ‘prepositional dative’ (PDAT - ‘send it to me’),
a double-object (GTD - ‘send me it’) and an alternative regionally marked double
object construction (TGD - ‘send it me’). Corpus evidence reveals the pronominal
TGD as the most frequent variant until the beginning of the 19th century, when the
PDAT gained preference. The pronominal GTD, now considered canonical, emerges
at the beginning of the 20th century. Broad agreement over the geographical distribution
of the ditransitive is based primarily on maps drawn from the Survey of
English Dialects (SED), but “comprehensive frequency data” (Yáñez Bouza & Denison,
2015, p.248) is lacking. The current project provides detailed frequency data
drawn from language use on Twitter which is accurately mapped according to GPS
coding. This map shows remarkable crossover with the SED maps, demonstrating
both the stability of the geographical distribution over time and the amenability
of “interactive written discourse” (Ferrara, Brunner, & Whittemore, 1991) to the
expression of dialect. The results detail a large degree of variation in the relative
frequency of each variable over physical space. Such variation brings into focus some
important questions regarding the nature of a language as conceived in formal linguistic
theory and a problematic tendency to ‘lump together’ large, linguistically
diverse regions and treat them as one entity (Siewierska & Hollmann, 2007, p.97).
Instead, using statistical tests for difference, the present study groups contiguous
regions by the relative probabilistic frequencies of each variant. The results have
implications for dialect geography, dialect syntax and recent approaches concerning
regionally sensitive probabilistic approaches to grammar (Bresnan & Ford, 2010).
