Dative alternation in Indian English: A corpus‐based analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe dative alternation refers to the alternation between two constructions that denote some type of transfer: the double object construction (I give my sister a book) vs. the to‐dative construction (I give a book to my sister). We examined the motivations behind the dative alternation in Indian English. A corpus study was performed based on a sample of N = 943 sentences that were drawn from the Kolhapur corpus. Using a mixed‐effects logistic regression analysis, we evaluated the effect of 14 predictors that are known to influence the dative alternation in other macro‐regional varieties of English. Three predictors were found to be significant: the sentence verb (modeled as a random intercept), the pronominality of the Recipient and the difference in length between the Recipient and the Theme. Our results further corroborate earlier findings that the to‐dative construction is more frequently used in Indian English than in other varieties. We argue that the latter tendency may be associated with a transfer from Hindi.