Dative alternation in Italian-to-Dutch translation

We explored the claim that structural priming is a case of implicit learning within the language production system. The experiment began with a baseline phase, in which we assessed participants' rates of production for double object and prepositional object constructions. Then participants were biased toward the production of either the double object or prepositional object construction. Finally, we again assessed participants' rates of production for the target constructions. Consistent with claims that structural priming is a case of implicit learning, we found that biasing participants toward the prepositional object construction produced stronger cumulative priming effects than did biasing participants toward the double object construction. We also found that individual differences in implicit learning were marginally correlated with overall rates of production for the double object construction. Participants who scored better on the learning task tended to produce fewer double object constructions.

There is no consensus on whether syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Mandarin. In four experiments, we adopted the syntactic priming paradigm to investigate the independence of syntactic representation in Mandarin. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the priming effects of double object construction (DO) and prepositional object construction (PO) with the ditransitive verb being repeated across the prime and target. Experiment 1 showed two-way priming effects of DO and PO. Experiment 2 showed that the syntactic priming effects persisted regardless of whether the semantic features (animacy of the Theme) matched across the prime and target or not. Furthermore, such effects persisted in Experiments 3 and 4 where the ditransitive verb across the prime and target was not repeated. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that syntactic/semantic independence is universal and favoured over the traditional Chinese grammar account, which claims that the syntactic representation of Mandarin is not independent of the semantic representation.

‘Dative alternation’ refers to a linguistic phenomenon related to ditransitive verbs, that is, verbs which take a subject and two objects referring to a theme and a recipient. In English, the phenomenon offers the possibility of alternation between a prepositional object construction (PREP), where the recipient is encoded as a prepositional phrase (give it to him), a double object construction (DOC), where the recipient precedes the theme (give him it) and an alternative double object construction (altDOC), where the theme takes precedence over the recipient (give it him), the latter constrained to dialectal usage. Even though this alternation has been extensively addressed in the literature, few studies have considered language-external factors in determining the choice of encoding. This paper analyses the distribution of ditransitive forms in competition in contemporary British English from a twofold perspective, shedding some light on the distribution of these variants across time, along with the study of PREP, DOC and altDOC in relation to their sociolinguistic dimension. The corpus used as source of evidence is the British National Corpus, a 100-million-word collection of both written and spoken language from a wide range of sources.

El principal foco de investigación de esta tesis doctoral se centra en el estudio lingüístico comparado de un tipo de predicados complejos, como son las construcciones de alternancia del dativo (CADs) en inglés y en español, tomando como punto de partida propuestas de la teoría lingüística (p.ej. Dryer 1986; Larson 2014, 1990, 1988; Pylkkänen 2002; Snyder 2001, 1995; Snyder y Stromswold 1997 en inglés; Bruhn de Garavito 2000; Cuervo 2007, 2003a, 2003b; Demonte 1995, 1994; Kempchinsky 2004 en español). Estas propuestas teóricas son aplicadas al estudio de la adquisición monolingüe y bilingüe. 
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\nEl análisis de datos muestra que las construcciones preposicionales y las de doble objeto emergen alrededor de la misma edad tanto en inglés como en español, como se refleja en los datos de los niños monolingües y en las dos lenguas de los niños bilingües. No existen diferencias de género biológico en los dos grupos de lenguas. Estos datos apuntan a una relación sintáctica no derivacional (e.g. Marantz 1993; Mulder 1992; Snyder y Stromswold 1997; Snyder 2001, 1995; en inglés; Cuervo 2003a, 2003b en español) y a una analogía semántica (Baker 1988) entre los dos tipos de CADs en inglés y en español. Aunque ambas estructuras maduran a una edad similar, las construcciones preposicionales se empiezan a producir más tarde y muestran una incidencia más baja a lo largo del desarrollo en comparación con las construcciones de doble objeto, como se observa en los datos de los niños monolingües y bilingües en cada lengua. Estos resultados podrían estar relacionados con las propiedades adicionales que se requieren para la producción de las construcciones preposicionales y/o con la influencia del input en el habla de los adultos en la producción de los niños. Resultados similares aparecen cuando se compara el inglés con el español en el caso de la producción de ambos grupos monolingües y de los bilingües. Por tanto, en vista del patrón de adquisición, las propiedades que caracterizan a las construcciones de doble objeto y las preposicionales indican un paralelismo entre el inglés y el español y, además, la frecuencia de exposición de estas construcciones en el habla de los adultos podría también haber jugado un papel similar en la producción de los niños cuando se comparan las dos lenguas.

Is long-term structural priming affected by patterns of experience with individual verbs?

It is well established that speakers are inclined to repeat themselves or their interlocutors in native language (L1) and second language (L2) conversations. This phenomenon is largely attributed to priming, whereby exposure to a given language form, i.e. prime, facilitates its processing or that of a related form in a subsequent language production, i.e. target. The present study uses an innovative combination of corpus-linguistic methods and manual analyses to identify syntactic priming of verb-particle constructions (e.g., taking out a paper vs. taking a paper out), the dative construction (e.g., giving Emma a paper vs. giving a paper to Emma) and the caused-motion construction (e.g., putting the money in Emma’s pocket), which shares its constituent structure with the prepositional dative and its semantics with both dative alternation variants. These constructions are studied in task-based free dialogues among native English and L1- German L2 speakers of English. Binary logistic regressions from a generalized linear model (GLM) are employed to disentangle the priming effect from other factors that might be predictors for the target. The analysis of all three constructions controls for interaction between primes and prime-target pair intervening distance, lexical boost and speaker identity. The verb-particle construction results show no evidence for priming as an independent predictor of verb-particle variant reproduction in L1-L1 and L2-L2 conversations. In both language conditions, the reuse of verb-particle constructions can largely be explained by the same set of factors, i.e. the syllable length of the direct object and whether it is new to the discourse. The dative alternation analysis reveals evidence for priming in the L1-L1 and L2-L2 conversations even when controlling for various discourse-related predictors. In the former condition, the difference in length between the target’s themes and recipients and the discourse accessibility of the theme, along with prime-target pair distance and structural similarity, are found to be the best predictors for the target. In the L2-L2 language condition, seven factors are found to best predict the target in the L2 conversations in addition to the identity of the prime, e.g., the pronominality and animacy of the recipient and the concreteness of the theme. The caused-motion analysis shows that it is amenable to priming even though more double object targets follow the caused-motion primes than prepositional dative targets, which are structurally similar to the caused-motion primes. The study finds little support for the relevance of the prime-target distance to the strength of priming across constructions and language conditions. The results also show that the magnitude of priming is unaffected by the identity of the prime-target pair speaker across constructions and language conditions. Finally, (partial) lexical overlap (the so-called lexical boost) is found to encourage the reuse of particle placement primes in the L2-L2 condition (e.g., take out the money – put back the money). For the dative alternation analysis, only some lexical factors (e.g., primetarget main verb lemma match and the semantic class of the target’s main verb) boost the magnitude of dative alternation priming in the L2-L2, but not the L1-L1 language condition. In addition, a shared main verb lemma seems to increase the likelihood of reused caused-motion primes. Taken together, these results indicate that the L1-L1 and L2-L2 reuse of primed constructions is conditioned by the shared constituent structure between prime-target pairs, but also by the mapping of syntactic features to semantic and lexical features of the primed sentence.

Three ditransitive constructions can be found in varieties of British English: (i) the ‘prepositional object construction’, where the recipient is encoded as a prepositional phrase (gave it to him); (ii) the ‘canonical double object construction’, where the recipient precedes the theme (gave him it); and (iii) the ‘alternative double object construction’, where the theme precedes the recipient (gave it him). The last of these constructions is typically found in (north)western varieties of British English when both objects are pronominal, and most of the relevant varieties have a ‘canonical’ ordering (REC > TH) when the theme is non-pronominal. Consequently, there seems to be an ‘inconsistency’ in the clause structure of the varieties in question. Using comparative and historical evidence, this article addresses the question of how this inconsistency can be explained. The ‘paradigmatic mismatch’ under discussion is shown to be a remnant of Old English clause structure which can also be observed in other verb second languages such as Modern German. It is argued to result from a tendency for both verb positions (finite/left and non-finite/right) to attract direct objects. This tendency is regarded as an effect of performance preferences in natural language discourse.

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to reuse the same structural pattern as one that was previously encountered (Bock, 1986). The effectiveness of structural priming has been an issue of much discussion in the field of second language acquisition over decades. This study aims at investigating the role of structural priming in Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ acquisition of double object (DO) construction. Specifically, it addresses two questions: (i) whether structural priming can facilitate second language acquisition of English DO construction in the short-term and long-term; (ii) whether different priming conditions by manipulating the intervening lags between prime and target have different learning effect. With a pretest-treatment–posttest–delayed posttest research design, 60 intermediate level Chinese EFL learners from three intact English classrooms in a junior college were assigned to three groups: control group, no-lag priming group and long-lag priming group. Results showed that the two treatment groups showed an overall increase in DO production in picture description tasks after the structural priming treatment, whereas the control group remained almost the same in target structure production over the three testing sessions. In addition, the no-lag priming group outperformed the long-lag priming group in the immediate posttest. These findings suggested that structural priming facilitated Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of DO construction both in the short-term and long-term. Moreover, manipulating the lags between prime and target can only mediate the short-term learning effect. These results are analyzed in light of frequency effect and contextual effect in the frame of usage-based theory of language acquisition.

This study deals with the syntactic (non-)derivational relationship of English dative alternation (DA) –double object constructions (DOCs) and to/for-datives–, as seen in the spontaneous production of English-Spanish bilinguals when compared to English monolinguals. While a chronological progression and a difference in use between the two English DA constructions could suggest a syntactic-derivational relationship between DOCs and to/for-datives, a fairly similar emergence and a possibly similar rate of use could point to the two constructions not displaying a syntactic-derivational status. We also explore whether English-Spanish bilinguals show divergent developmental paths when compared to English monolinguals. To address these issues, we analyze data from nine English-Spanish bilingual children and twelve English monolingual children, along with the adults interacting with them. The analysis shows that both DA structures emerge at a similar age, which suggests they are not syntactically derived from one another. Despite these differences, the later onset and the lower incidence of to/for-datives could be associated with the case and theta role mediated properties of prepositions as well as with the frequency of exposure to DA in the adults’ speech. As no differences appear between bilinguals and monolinguals, transfer from Spanish does not seem to be an issue.

The discussion in chapter 3 was primarily concerned with the D-structure representation of triadic constructions, and the nature of Dative Shift. In this chapter, a number of S-structure phenomena associated with double object constructions will be addressed. These will be shown to lend further support to a number of ingredients of the analysis of Dative Shift presented in chapter 3. Some will moreover be seen to constitute arguments for the view that double object constructions are in principle structurally ambiguous between ‘‘genuine’’ Dative Shift constructions and “covert” prepositional dative constructions featuring an empty dative preposition. In this section I shall be concerned with the restrictions on A’-movement of the double object Goal. It will be shown that, while overt wh-movement of the indirect object in a double object construction is generally possible, this constituent resists being the input to EMPTY OPERATOR MOVEMENT. Given a number of independently plausible assumptions, we can derive from this an important argument in favour of the inclusion of an empty dative preposition in the structure of the double object construction (cf. also Kayne 1984; Czepluch 1982). In the literature on double object constructions, applicatives and Dative Shift, a recurrent theme is the fact that, in many languages, indirect (or applied) objects appear to resist being A’-moved. Since so much attention has been paid to it, and since its weight as an argument for or against a particular analysis of triadic constructions is generally considerable, it is important to first present a concise inventory of the relevant data.

Many ditransitive events can be expressed in German using either the indirect object construction (IOC) or the prepositional object construction (POC). While most previous research on ditransitives in German has focused on the IOC, very little attention has been paid to the much rarer POC or to individual verb biases for the IOC vs. the POC. We investigated structural preferences of native speakers of German using elicited production and acceptability judgment studies. The results show that the POC is not as restricted as previously thought, and that different modalities (i.e., production vs. comprehension) reveal different aspects of verb biases, which can be easily missed when relying on one type of data.

The study investigates change in the use of the verb göra ‘make, do’ in the double object construction (DOC) and prepositional object constructions (POCs) with till and åt in Sweden Swed-ish and Finland Swedish prose fiction texts between 1800 and 1999. In both the Sweden Swedish and the Finland Swedish data, the use of göra in the DOC decreases in text frequency and in lexical richness (i.e. the number of nouns available as direct object). In the Sweden Swedish data, the use of POCs increases in the second half of the twentieth century. No such increase was found in the Finland Swedish data. In the nineteenth century, göra occurs mainly in the DOC as a light verb with abstract direct objects in both Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish, and only occasionally appears as a verb of creation with concrete direct objects. The decrease of göra in the DOC is concomitant with a general decrease in the use of göra as a light verb. In Sweden Swedish, göra in the åt-POC and till-POC is increasingly associated with concrete direct objects. The increase of the POCs in Sweden Swedish indicates that göra is more frequently used as a default verb of creation. The preposition åt is generally considered a “Finland-ism”, being more frequent in Finland Swedish than in Sweden Swedish. The results of the study indicate no such tendency. It is possible that the scarcity of POCs in the late twentieth century Finland Swedish texts is due to the fact that Finland Swedish authors try to avoid Finlandisms.

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.

This study examines whether biological gender differences appear in the early stages of acquisition in the case of English dative alternation (DA) structures (double object constructions (DOCs) and to/for-datives). Girls have been found to show faster syntactic development when compared to boys (Lovas, 2011). In the case of the acquisition of DA, an order in the emergence and in the incidence of English DA would entail a syntactic derivational status between DOCs and to/for-datives with one being the original structure and the other the derived one (Gu, 2010). However, analogous ages of onset and fairly similar frequency rates in the production could suggest the construction of two underived structures. We investigate whether biological gender differences appear in the case of DOCs and to/for-datives. We also investigate whether the exposure to English DA (adult input) results in differences between the girls’ output and the boys’ output. We analyze data from seven monolingual English girls and six monolingual English boys, and the adults that interact with them, as available in CHILDES. Our findings reveal that monolingual girls and monolingual boys pattern closely in the acquisition of the syntactic non-derivational relationship between DOCs and to/for-datives, as seen in their similar emergence. Biological gender differences are not seen either in the acquisition of the additional properties of to/for-datives given their later onset and their lower incidence when compared to DOCs. These production patterns also correlate with the frequency with which these structures are heard in the adult input.

This paper mainly studies English dative alternation from a diachronic point of view. As a verb of caused-possession, the typical ditransitive verb give is contrasted with send and tell in respect of their different structural biases diachronically (12th–19th centuries). We built dynamic, syn-diachronic structural models, and made contrastive observations on structural biases of the verbs. The verb give shows a strong tendency to occur in the double object construction, send has a structural bias towards the prepositional object construction and tell shows preference for the clausal complement diachronically, which suggests the determining role of lexical semantics of the verb in its structural preference and the meaning of syntactic structures in which the verb occurs.