Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T16:17:26.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE DATIVE ALTERNATION IN GERMAN-ENGLISH INTERLANGUAGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2015

Katja Jäschke  and
Ingo Plag
Katja Jäschke
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Ingo Plag*
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ingo Plag, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, English Language and Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 40204 Düsseldorf, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigates the role of probabilistic grammatical constraints on the dative alternation in English as a second language (ESL). It presents the results of an experiment in which the different factors that are influential in first language (L1) English are tested with advanced learners of English whose L1 is German. Second language (L2) learners are influenced by the same determinants as L1 speakers but to a lesser degree. Together with the results of previous studies, the present results suggest that, initially, the learners do not make use of probabilistic constraints in spite of the constraints being influential in the L1 and only gradually acquire a sensitivity toward the constraints that govern the choice between the two dative constructions.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 485 - 521
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aarts, B. (2007). Syntactic gradience: The nature of grammatical indeterminacy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Aarts, B. (2008). English syntax and argumentation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Aissen, J. (1999). Markedness and subject choice in optimality theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 17, 673–711.Google Scholar
Aissen, J. (2003). Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 21, 435–483.Google Scholar
Arnold, J., Wasow, T. Losongco, A., & Ginstorm, R. (2000). Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of complexity and information structure on constituent ordering. Language, 76, 28–55.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bader, M., & Häussler, J. (2010). Word order in German: A corpus study. Lingua, 120, 717–762.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Sarkar, D., Bates, M., & Matrix, L. (2007). The lme4 package (Version 2.4.1) [Computer software]. Retrieved from http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/index.html Google Scholar
Behagel, O. (1909). Beziehung zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge der Satzglieder [Relationship between size and sequencing of constituents]. Indogermanische Forschung, 25, 110–142.Google Scholar
Belsley, D. A., Kuh, E., & Welsch, R. E. (1980). Regression diagnostics. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bod, R., Hay, J., & Jannedy, S. (Eds.). (2003). Probabilistic linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J. (2007). Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation. In Featherston, S. & Sternefeld, W. (Eds.), Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base (pp. 77–96). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J., & Ford, M. (2010). Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English. Language, 86, 168–213.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J., & Hay, J. (2008). Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English. Lingua, 118, 245–259.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J., & Nikitina, T. (2009). The gradience of the dative alternation. In Uyechi, L. & Wee, L.-H. (Eds.), Reality exploration and discovery: Pattern interaction in language and life (pp. 161–184). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J., Dingare, S., & Manning, C. D. (2001). Soft constraints mirror hard constraints: Voice and person in English and Lummi. In Butt, M. & Holloway King, T. (Eds.), Proceedings of the LFG01 Conference (pp. 13–32). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T., & Baayen, H. (2007). Predicting the dative alternation. In Bouma, G., Krämer, I., & Zwarts, J. (Eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation (pp. 69–94). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.Google Scholar
Büring, D. (2001). What do definites do that indefinites definitely don’t? In Féry, C. & Sternefeld, W. (Eds.), Audiatur Vox Sapentiae – A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow (pp. 70–100). Berlin, Germany: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Callies, M., & Szczesniak, K. (2008). Argument realisation, information status and syntactic weight—A learner-corpus study of the dative alternation. In Walter, M. & Grommes, P. (Eds.), Fortgeschrittene Lernervarietäten: Korpuslinguistik und Zweitsprachenerwerbsforschung (pp. 165–187). Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Chang, L. S. (2004). Discourse effects on EFL learners’ production of dative constructions. Journal of National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, 33, 145–170.Google Scholar
Cleveland, W. S. (1979). Robust locally weighted regression and smoothing scatterplots. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 74, 829–836.Google Scholar
Collins, P. (1995). The indirect object construction in English: An informational approach. Linguistics, 33, 35–49.Google Scholar
Davies, W. D. (1994). English dative alternation and evidence for a thematic strategy in adult SLA. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 5, 59–82.Google Scholar
Edmonds, J. E. (1972). Evidence that the indirect object rule is a structure-preserving rule. Foundations of Language, 8, 546–561.Google Scholar
Edmonds, J. E. (1976). A transformational approach to English syntax. New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ferrari, S., & Cribari-Neto, F. (2004). Beta regression for modelling rates and proportions. Journal of Applied Statistics, 31, 799–815.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. (1965). The indirect object construction in English and the ordering of transformations. The Hague, France: Mouton.Google Scholar
Friedman, L., & Wall, M. (2005). Graphical views of suppression and multicollinearity in multiple regression. The American Statistician, 59, 127–136.Google Scholar
Führer, M. (2009). The dative alternation in the interlanguage of German learners of English (Unpublished bachelor’s thesis). Universität Siegen, Germany.Google Scholar
Godfrey, J. J., Holliman, E. C., & McDaniel, J. (1992). SWITCHBOARD: Telephone speech corpus for research and development. In ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (pp. 517–520). San Francisco, CA: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.Google Scholar
Grafmiller, J., & Shih, S. (2011, January). Weighing in on end weight. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Pittsburgh, PA.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (2014). Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, R. (1987). Markedness and the acquisition of the English dative alternation by L2 speakers. Second Language Research, 3, 21–55.Google Scholar
Hinrichs, L., & Szmrecsanyi, P. (2007). Recent changes in the function and frequency of Standard English genitive constructions: A multivariate analysis of tagged corpora. English Language and Linguistics, 11, 437–474.Google Scholar
Holling, H. (1983). Suppressor structures in the general linear model. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 43, 1–9.Google Scholar
Inagaki, S. (1997). Japanese and Chinese learners’ acquisition of the narrow range rules for the dative alternation in English. Language Learning, 47, 637–669.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1975). Morphological and semantic regularities in the lexicon. Language, 51, 639–671.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R., & Culicover, P. (1971). A reconsideration of dative movements. Foundations of Language, 7, 397–412.Google Scholar
Kapatsinski, V. (2014). What is grammar like? A usage-based constructionist perspective. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 11, 1–41.Google Scholar
Kellerman, E. (1985). Dative alternation and the analysis of data: A reply to Mazurkewich. Language Learning, 35, 91–101.Google Scholar
Krifka, M. (2003). Semantic and pragmatic conditions for the dative alternation. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics, 4, 1–32.Google Scholar
Le Compagnon, B. (1984). Interference and overgeneralization in second language learning: The acquisition of English dative verbs by native speakers of French. Language Learning, 34, 39–67.Google Scholar
Lenerz, J. (1977). Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen [On the sequencing of nominal constituents in German]. Tübingen, Germany: Narr.Google Scholar
Marefat, H. (2004). The impact of information structure as a discourse factor on the acquisition of dative alternation by L2 learners. Studia Linguistica, 59, 66–82.Google Scholar
Mazurkewich, I. (1981). Second language acquisition of the dative alternation and markedness: The best theory (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Université de Montréal, Canada.Google Scholar
Mazurkewich, I. (1984). The acquisition of the dative alternation by second language learners and linguistic theory. Language Learning, 34, 91–109.Google Scholar
Mazurkewich, I. (1985). Syntactic markedness and language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 7, 15–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonough, K. (2006). Interaction and syntactic priming: English L2 speakers’ production of dative constructions. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 179–207.Google Scholar
Mondorf, B. (2009). More support for more-support: The role of processing constraints on the choice between synthetic and analytic comparative forms. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, M. C., Anttila, A., Fong, V., & Maling, J. (2004, January). Differential possessor expression in English: Re-evaluating animacy and topicality effects. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Oehrle, R. T. (1976). The grammar of the English dative alternation (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Pechmann, T., Uszkoreit, H., Engelkamp, J., & Zerbst, D. (1994). Word order in the German middle field: Linguistic theory and psycholinguistic evidence (Report No. 43). Saarbrücken, Germany: Universität des Saarlandes.Google Scholar
Pienemann, M. (1998). Language processing and second language development: Processability theory. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Pienemann, M. (Ed.). (2005). Cross-linguistic aspects of Processability Theory. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1982). A theory of the acquisition of lexical interpretive grammars. In Bresnan, J. (Ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations (pp. 655–726). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. (1993). Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in Generative Grammar (RuCCS Technical Report-2). Piscateway, NJ: Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2011). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 2.14.1) [Computer software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, G. (1996). Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 149–182.Google Scholar
Røreng, A. (2011). Die deutsche Doppelobjektkonstruktion. Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zur relativen Abfolge nominaler Akkusativ- und Dativobjekte im geschriebenen Deutsch [The German double object construction: A corpus based study of the sequencing of accusative and dative objects in written German] (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Tromsø, Norway.Google Scholar
Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, M. (1976). Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Dixon, R. M. W. (Ed.), Grammatical categories in Australian languages (pp. 112–171). Canberra, Australia: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.Google Scholar
Smyth, R. H., Prideaux, G. D., & Hogan, J. T. (1979). The effect of context on dative position. Lingua, 47, 27–42.Google Scholar
Tanaka, S. (1987). The selective use of specific exemplars in second-language performance: The case of the dative alternation. Language Learning, 37, 63–88.Google Scholar
Theijssen, D., van Halteren, H., Boves, L., & Oostdijk, N. (2012). On the difficulty of making concreteness concrete. Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal, 1, 61–77.Google Scholar
Tily, H., Gahlr, S., Arnon, I., Snider, N., Kothari, A., & Bresnan, J. (2009). Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech. Language and Cognition, 1, 147–165.Google Scholar
Wasow, T. (1997). End weight from the speaker’s perspective. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26, 347–361.Google Scholar
Wasow, T. (2002). Postverbal behavior. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Wolk, C., Bresnan, J., Rosenbach, A., & Szmrecsanyi, B. (2013). Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: Exploring cross-constructional variation and change. Diachronica, 30, 382–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolk, C., Wolfer, S., Baumann, P., Hemforth, B., & Konieczny, L. (2011). Acquiring English dative verbs: Proficiency effect in German L2 learners. In Carlson, L., Hölscher, C., & Shipley, T. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2401–2406). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar