This book addresses one of the most pervasive questions in historical linguistics - why
variation becomes stable rather than being eliminated - by revisiting the so far neglected
history of the English dative alternation. The alternation between a nominal and a
prepositional ditransitive pattern (John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary) emerged
in Middle English and is closely connected to broader changes at that time. Accordingly the
main quantitative investigation focuses on ditransitive patterns in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed
Corpus of Middle English in addition the book employs an Evolutionary Game Theory model. The
results are approached from an 'evolutionary construction grammar' perspective combining
evolutionary thinking with diachronic constructionist notions and the alternation's emergence
is interpreted as a story of constructional innovation competition cooperation and
co-evolution. The book not only provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the history of one
of the most-discussed syntactic phenomena in English but by fusing two frameworks and
employing two different methodologies also presents a highly innovative approach to a problem
of relevance to historical linguistics in general.
