Collocations

This came up in class the other day. Is there a difference in meaning or dialect between "respect for" and "respect to"?

My go-to place to resolve this is ludwig.guru , which now nudges you to sign up for an account,

as is understandable because a free service needs to finance itself at some point and a list of users is its currency.  This resource provides contextual examples (sentences) and cites the newspaper source where the phrase is found.

https://ludwig.guru/s/respect+for
https://ludwig.guru/s/respect+to

I realized that I had to make the query more specific, especially when one with of the "hits" was respect, for sure which wasn't on my radar.

https://ludwig.guru/s/show+respect+for

https://ludwig.guru/s/show+respect+to

I couldn't find a UK-US divide on this, so I wondered if the divide could be generational. My go-to for that is Google Ngrams. This tool is based on raw numbers of use, as found in Google's on-line collection of books in machine-readable text.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=show+respect+for%2C+show+respect+to&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

Sure enough, there is a cross-over point between 1935 and 1936, when "show respect for" is used more often in written text than is "show respect to." Even more interesting is that we seem to be headed for another crossover point. Since 22012, "show respect to" is increasingly used while "show respect for" plummets down.

Undaunted, I tried to isolate American texts. Here I find that not much respect was to be had in 1920, but that was the cross-over point from which "show respect for" dominated.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=show+respect+for%2Cshow+respect+to&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US-2019&smoothing=3

We see that "show respect for" tapers off, "show respect to" continues to gain popularity. Nevertheless, without a totally downward arc, the for's may yet continue to dominate the to's, at least tin American literature!

I still have one more clue. I wonder if the difference in the US goes along a North-South divide. Now I turn to the COCA database, which does require a no-fee registration, but favors those in academia in terms of access, apparently because of its limited retrieval resources. The Corpus of Contemporary American English includes a range of online media that reflects popular culture: ESPN, the Harvard Law Review, and court.ca.gov (a government webiste with court decisions recorded in California) are grist for the mill here. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/x3.asp?x2w=y&xx=1&w10=show&w11=respect&w12=for&r=   is the search key if you have login access.

This snapshot of https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/x3.asp?x2w=y&xx=1&w10=show&w11=respect&w12=to&r=

looks to Vanderbilt Law Review, Slate (magazine), and the familiar ESPN for instances of "show respect to" in the context where they occur.

At last, I address Google's search engine, where I might as well have started out. As I type in "show respect for or t," Google anticipates that there is a controversy. 

I amble over to Merriam Webster, Collins, and the freedictionary.com , but nothing seems settled as they differ or don't address the issue. I notice threads in word forums and English language websites, but nothing seems consistent. Then I strike a page that organizes the options and apparent inconsistency in a way that makes sense to me and gives the answer that I dreaded: sometimes either one works.

https://oneminuteenglish.org/en/respect-to-for/#: (Archived)

This plants a seed. At best, variationist sociolinguistics has a research paradigm if one (not me!) were to explore further when one form occurs and not the other, even in the same speaker, but in different venues or with dialog partners of different ages or professions.