Dokument: The Dative Alternation in English as a Second Language
| Titel: | The Dative Alternation in English as a Second Language | |||||||
| URL für Lesezeichen: | https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=42540 | |||||||
| URN (NBN): | urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20170608-113157-3 | |||||||
| Kollektion: | Dissertationen | |||||||
| Sprache: | Englisch | |||||||
| Dokumententyp: | Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation | |||||||
| Medientyp: | Text | |||||||
| Autor: | Jäschke, Katja [Autor] | |||||||
| Dateien: |
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| Beitragende: | Prof. Dr. Plag, Ingo [Betreuer/Doktorvater] Prof. Dr. Callies, Marcus [Gutachter] | |||||||
| Stichwörter: | Dative Alternation, Grammatical Variation, English as a Second Language, Language Acquisition | |||||||
| Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation: | 400 Sprache » 410 Linguistik | |||||||
| Beschreibung: | This project investigated how learners of English use, judge and process the two dative constructions which are displayed in (1). The variation between these two constructions is commonly referred to as the dative alternation.
(1) a. The boy gives [the flowers]theme [to his girlfriend]recipient. PP dative b. The boy gives [his girlfriend]recipient [the flowers]theme. DO dative It is standardly taken that the two variants displayed in (1) are semantically equivalent. Recent studies of English as an L1 (e.g. Bresnan et al. 2007) show that native speakers’ choices depend on the interplay of multiple linguistic factors. More prominent (i.e., animate, definite, pronominal, given) and shorter constituents precede less prominent (i.e., inanimate, indefinite, nonpronominal, new) and longer ones. Thus, short and more prominent themes trigger the PP dative, while short and more prominent recipients trigger the DO dative. When investigating a phenomenon whose outcome is determined by such a variety of factors, multifactorial modeling is indispensable. With respect to the dative alternation in English as a second language much less research has been done. It has often been claimed that learners acquire the PP dative before the DO dative. Some studies address the effects of the linguistic factors, but there is hardly any study in which multifactorial modeling is used for data analysis (e.g. Callies 2008, Tanaka 1987). This present project is the first one to systematically investigate the influence of the probabilistic factors in the dative alternation in English as an L2 using multifactorial techniques. I conducted three studies – two experimental studies and one corpus study. The experiments were both replications of Bresnan and Ford (2010) and conducted with advance German learners of English. The first study was a split rating task in which participants had to rate whether they prefer the PP or DO dative for a given item on a gradient scale. The items were constructed in a way which allowed for testing the influence of all pertinent factors. The results showed that learners are influenced by almost the same factors as the L1 speakers, but discourse-related factors (new vs given) did not play a role. A general preference for the PP dative was not detected. The second study was a self-paced reading study to examine how learners process dative constructions. Participants read PP datives and it was investigated in which way the linguistic properties of the NP preceding the preposition to, i.e., the theme, influence how fast the preposition was being read. I found that reading times decreased for short and definite themes and increase for animate themes. These findings indicate two things. First, the order of constituents which was preferred in the split-rating task reflects the word order which is easier to process. Second, the effect for animacy does not support the assumption that animate NPs are easier to process but that learners assign thematic roles to constituents while reading, built up expectations and revise those expectations when they realize that they were false. The third study was a corpus study in which over 3000 dative constructions, uttered by speakers from 16 different L1 backgrounds (ICLE, Granger et al. 2009), were analyzed and compared against native speaker data (Treebank Wall Street Journal collection, Bresnan et al. 2007). It was shown that learners align theme and recipient in the predicted way when producing dative constructions but that learners from different L1 background significantly differ from each other. Learners from a Germanic background and Tswana are far less likely to produce PP dative than learners whose native language is, e.g., a Romance language or Turkish. Another finding was that learners from many, but not all, L1 backgrounds differ from native speakers in their production of dative constructions in that they are more likely to produce PP datives. Learners whose L1 has a construction similar to the English DO dative are more successful in mastering a native-like distribution, while learners whose L1 has a construction which resembles the PP dative do not seem to benefit. In conclusion, the project’s results indicate that learners are influenced by the same linguistic factors as native speakers in production, use and processing of dative constructions. If learners differ from L1 speakers, they overuse the PP dative, but this tendency was only found in the corpus study. | |||||||
| Lizenz: |  Urheberrechtsschutz | |||||||
| Fachbereich / Einrichtung: | Philosophische Fakultät » Anglistisches Institut » Englische Sprachwissenschaft (III) | |||||||
| Dokument erstellt am: | 08.06.2017 | |||||||
| Dateien geändert am: | 08.06.2017 | |||||||
| Promotionsantrag am: | 21.03.2016 | |||||||
| Datum der Promotion: | 05.07.2016 |
