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Ditransitives in Germanic Languages: Synchronic and diachronic aspects
Edited by Eva Zehentner, Melanie Röthlisberger and Timothy Colleman
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 7] 2023
► pp. 264–298

The dative alternation in German

Structural preferences and verb bias effects

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.

Keywords: verb bias, German, ditransitive structure, structural preference, dative alternation, probabilistic language production, syntactic representation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The dative alternation
    • 1.2The present study
  • 2.Study 1: Sentence completion task
    • 2.1Method
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Design and materials
      • 2.1.3Procedure
      • 2.1.4Coding
    • 2.2Results
      • 2.2.1Use of IOC and POC
      • 2.2.2Use of prepositions in the POC
    • 2.3Discussion
  • 3.Study 2: Acceptability judgment task
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Design and materials
      • 3.1.3Procedure
      • 3.1.4Results
      • 3.1.5Discussion
  • 4.General discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.7.08kho
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