Lexical variation in the double object construction in 19th and 20th century Swedish

This article studies changes in the Swedish double object construction (DOC), focusing on fourteen verb-specific constructions (see Croft 2001). The study uses two frequency measures – lexical variation and text frequency. The former measures the type frequency of nouns in the direct object slot of these verb-specific constructions and can be taken as a rough measure of productivity, while the latter deals with the token frequency of the verb-specific constructions as well as of the verbs in general. Most of the verb-specific constructions undergo a decrease in text frequency, mirroring the general decrease in text frequency of the DOC. Four of them show a decrease in lexical variation, indicating a connection between a decrease in lexical variation and a decrease in text frequency