Givenness and the dative alternation in Danish

1. Givenness and the dative alternation in Danish Johannes Kizach, University of Aarhus, English Degree Programme

2. The dative alternation: • Skolelæreren gav eleven et æble NP-construction teacher.the gave student.the an apple “The teacher gave the student an apple” • Skolelæreren gav et æble til eleven PP-construction teacher.the gave an apple to student.the “The teacher gave an apple to the student”

3. Information structure What decides how we order the theme and the recipient? Theme/rheme Given/new Topic/comment - but is this actually the case?

4. Givenness in corpus studies Bresnan et al. (2007) show that the construction type is correlated with givenness. It is far more likely to observe the NP-construction in cases where the recipient is given, than in cases where the recipient is new. The bar plot shows number of occurrences in the corpus. The NP-construction shows a clear bias for a given recipient. The PP-construction shows no bias.

5. Givenness in corpus studies Bresnan et al. (2007). The NP-construction is mostly found with given-new order. The PP-construction is less discriminate. The bar plot shows how the new-given, given-new and neutral orders are distributed in the NP- and PP-constructions.

6. Manipulating definiteness/givenness: a. President Clausen promised the mana jobNPdef-indef b. President Clausen promised a manthe jobNPindef-def c. President Clausen promised the job to a manPPdef-indef d. President Clausen promised a job to the manPPindef-def

7. Definiteness/givenness(Bresnan et al. 2007) Theme Recipient

8. Givenness in psycholinguistic experiments Clifton & Frazier (2004) report a series of speeded acceptability judgment experiments, showing that processing is facilitatedwhen a definite NP precedes an indefinite NP (faster RTs), but only in the NP-construction, not in the PP-construction where no such effect is found. Bar plot shows mean reaction times. The difference between the two NP-constructions is significant. The difference between the two PP-constructions is not.

9. Givenness in psycholinguistic experiments Clifton & Frazier (2004) experiment 2. Same as experiment 1, but now a one-sentence context establish the definite argument as given. Bar plot shows mean reaction times. The difference between the two NP-constructions is significant. The difference between the two PP-constructions is not.

10. Givenness in psycholinguistic experiments Brown, Savova & Gibson (2012) report a self-paced reading experiment, showing the same result as Clifton & Frazier (2004) reached. The given-new order is preferred for the NP-construction, but no preference is found in the PP-construction. Bar plot shows mean reading times in milliseconds for the second argument. The difference between the two NP-constructions is significant. The difference between the PP-constructions is not.

11. Experiment 1This work was done in collaboration with Laura Winther Balling (CBS). Do we see the same structural conditioning of givenness-effects in Danish? Specifically, do we find a reaction time difference in the NP-construction, but not in the PP-construction?

12. Experiment 1 Materials. 14 sentences were constructed using the 10 most frequent dative-alternating verbs (based on a search in KorpusDK, Bergenholtz 1992). a. Direktør Clausen lovede manden et arbejdeNPdef-indef president Clausen promised man.the a job “President Clausen promised the man a job” b. Direktør Clausen lovede en mand arbejdet NPindef-def “President Clausen promised a man the job” c. Direktør Clausen lovede arbejdet til en mandPPdef-indef “President Clausen promised the job to a man” d. Direktør Clausen lovede et arbejde til mandenPPindef-def “President Clausen promised a job to the man” The materials also included 64 fillers, 40 of which were sentences structurally similar to the target sentences but with semantic, syntactic or orthographic mistakes. The remaining 24 sentences were materials from an unrelated experiment.

13. Experiment 1 Procedure. The stimuli were presented in a pseudo-random order one sentence at a time in the middle of the screen following a fixation point (+). The subjects were instructed to accept or reject the sentences by pressing either a red X (rejection) or a green  (acceptance) marked on the keyboard. A training session with four items were run first to familiarize subjects with the task. Reaction times (RT) and answers were recorded. Stimulus presentation was done using the free DMASTR software (DMDX, version 4.0.4.8) developed at Monash University and University of Arizona by K.I. Forster and J.C. Forster. Subjects. 30, 9 males, 21 females.

14. Statistical methods (following Baayen 2008) We analyzed the data using a linear mixed-effects regression model. The mixed-part is because it includes both fixed and random factors. This means that the variance due to differences between subjects and differences between items can be statistically controlled. In other words, some of the noise from people and sentences can be filtered out. A model was fitted to the dependent variable log RT using the software R (R Development Core Team, 2009) and the lme4 package for R (Bates, Maechler & Bolker 2009).

15. Table shows the fixed factors in the regression model fitted to log RT with the NP-construction, and given-new as reference level.

16. Results Previous RT. When a subject has responded slowly, he will answer slowly on the next item too. Fast subjects will correspondingly answer fast. Notice, that this effect is there despite the fact that item and subject variance has been filtered out. Repetition. If a subject sees an specific construction multiple times, he will respond faster and faster (cf. Luka & Barsalou 2005 and Sprouse 2007). The crucial question: The construction*givenness interaction. Yes, the RT is significantly higher when the order is new-given, but only in the NP-construction. Error. Subjects are slower when they make a wrong answer.

17. The interaction between construction and givenness. The difference between the two NP-constructions is significant. The difference between the two PP-constructions is not (ascertained by means of likelihood ratio tests).

18. Error/rejected sentences Few cases were subjects have rejected the sentences, because all sentences are considered grammatical.

19. Conclusion The effect of information structure (the discourse variable givenness) is structurally conditioned in the sense that it only has an effect in the NP-construction, not in the PP-construction. “Syntactic representations can include information-structural constraints on their arguments” Brown, Savova & Gibson (2012:194)

20. Experiment 2(currentlyrunning) Does the givenness-effect in the NP-construction persist, when the complexities of the NPs are manipulated? a. Ibgaven gammelklog man med rød hatæblet “Ib gave an old wise man with a red hatthe apple” b. Ibgavden gamlekloge man med rød hatet æble “Ib gave the old wise man with a red hatan apple”

21. Experiment 2(currentlyrunning) Conditions (appear in a def-indef and an indef-def version, 5x2): a. Ib gave the manan apple b. Ib gave the old, wise manan apple c. Ib gave the old wise man with a hatan apple d. Ib gave the manan apple from Brazil e. Ib gave the mana very big, red apple from Brazil

22. References (the end) Baayen, R.H. (2008) Analyzing linguistic data – a practical introduction to statistics using R, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Baayen, R. H. (2011) languageR: Data sets and functions with "Analyzing Linguistic Data: A practical introduction to statistics", R package version 1.2. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=languageR. Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler & Ben Bolker (2011). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. R package version 0.999375-42. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4. Bergenholtz, Henning (1992) Dansk frekvensordbog: baseret på danske romaner, ugeblade og aviser, 1987-1990, G. E. C. Gad, København. Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina & R. HaraldBaayen (2007) “Predicting the Dative Alternation”, Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, G. Bouma, I. Kraemer & J. Zwarts (eds), Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam. Brown, Meredith, Virginia Savova & Edward Gibson (2012) “Syntax encodes information structure: evidence from on-line reading comprehension”, Journal of Memory and Language, 66, pp. 194-209. Clifton, Jr., Charles & Lyn Frazier (2004) “Should given information appear before new? Yes and no”, Memory and Cognition, 32, pp. 886-895. Luka, B.J. and Barsalou, L.W. (2005). Structural facilitation: Mere exposure effects for grammatical acceptability as evidence for syntactic priming in comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, pp. 436-459. R Development Core Team (2009) R: A language and environment for statistical computing, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL http://www.R-project.org. Sprouse, Jon (2007). Continuous acceptability, categorical grammaticality, and experimental syntax. Biolinguistics, 1, pp. 123-134.