Experimental Methodologies. A Corpus-Based Approach

On the basis of data, we analyse two different pairs of syntactic patterns, the so called dative alternation and particle placement of transitive phrasal verbs. Although it has sometimes been argued that only experimental data can contribute to studies of priming, the analysis shows that (a) the corpus-based results for datives are very similar to the experimental ones; (b) priming is also obtained for the verb particle construction, a construction hitherto not explored in the priming literature and (c), most importantly, in line with much previous psycholinguistic and corpus linguistic work, priming effects turn out to be strongly verb-specific such that some verbs are much more resistant or responsive to priming than others. As a variety of studies has shown, speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures they have just encountered (produced or comprehended) before.