The dative alternation in Danish and Polish – A learners perspective

• Authors: Johannes Kizach , Thomas Mathiasen
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Three experiments investigating how two groups of adult Polish learners of Danish as a foreign language acquire the Danish dative alternation are reported. Experiment 1 is a speeded acceptability judgment task, which shows that Group 1 has the same pattern as native speakers i.e. slower responses to the dispreffered new-given NP-constructions, but no givenness effect with the PP-constructions. Experiment 2 shows that Group 2 also have acquired this pattern, even though earlier research suggests that the givenness asymmetry in the dative alternation is hard to learn. Experiment 3 shows that even in Polish there is a givenness asymmetry, such that the given–new order is clearly preferred in the NP-construction, but less so in the PP-construction. The rapid acquisition of the Danish pattern could thus be explained by Polish having the same pattern. In short: Both Polish and Danish have a givenness asymmetry in the dative alternation, which could explain why Polish learners of Danish in both groups behave almost like native Danish speakers.

Keywords

EN

givenness asymmetry; dative alternation; psycholinguistics; language acquisition; word order

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 49
• Pages: 487-507

Dates

published

2013

received

2013-05-17

revised

2013-09-10

accepted

2013-09-16

Contributors

author

Johannes Kizach

• University of Århus, Århus, Denmark

author

Thomas Mathiasen

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2013-0018