Givenness and the dative alternation in Danish

Johannes Kizach, University of Aarhus, English Degree Programme

1

The dative alternation: 1) Skolelæreren gav eleven et æble

NP-construction teacher.the gave student.the an apple “The teacher gave the student an apple”

2) Skolelæreren gav et æble til eleven

PP-construction teacher.the gave an apple to student.the “The teacher gave an apple to the student”

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Information structure

What decides how we order the THEME and the RECIPIENT?

Theme/rhemeGiven/newTopic/comment

- but is this actually the case?

Givenness in corpus studies

NP PP0

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Rec = NewRec = Given

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.

Givenness in corpus studies

NP PP0

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New-givenGiven-newNeutral

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.

Manipulating definiteness/givenness:

a. President Clausen promised the man a job NPdef-indef

b. President Clausen promised a man the job NPindef-def

c. President Clausen promised the job to a man PPdef-indef

d. President Clausen promised a job to the man PPindef-def

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Definiteness/givenness(Bresnan et al. 2007)

Theme

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GivenNew

Recipient

Def Indef0

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GivenNew

Givenness in psycholinguistic experiments

NP PP0

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New-givenGiven-new

Clifton & Frazier (2004) report a series of speeded acceptability judgment experiments, showing that processing is facilitated when 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.

Givenness in psycholinguistic experiments

NP PP0

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New-givenGiven-new

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.

Givenness in psycholinguistic experiments

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New-givenGiven-new

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.

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?

Experiment 1Materials. 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 arbejde NPdef-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 mand PPdef-indef “President Clausen promised the job to a man”

d. Direktør Clausen lovede et arbejde til manden PPindef-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.

Experiment 1Procedure. 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.

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Statistical methods (following Baayen 2008) Variance

SubjectsItemsVariable 1Variable 2

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).

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

Estimate MCMCmean HPD95lower HPD95upper p

(Intercept) 79.742 79.670 78.454 80.773 0.0001

Givenness: new-given 0.1709 0.1698 0.0775 0.2607 0.0008

Construction: PP 0.0898 0.0901 -0.0182 0.1936 0.0972

Error 0.1189 0.1235 0.0537 0.1905 0.0012

Repetition -0.0079 -0.0078 -0.0120 -0.0039 0.0002

Previous RT 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0001Givenness: new-given Construction: PP -0.2597 -0.2588 -0.3853 -0.1264 0.0001

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ResultsPrevious 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.

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).

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logRT

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Error/rejected sentencesFew cases were subjects have

rejected the sentences, because all sentences are considered grammatical.

NP def-indef

NP indef-d

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RejectedAccpeted

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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)

Experiment 2 (currently running)

Does the givenness-effect in the NP-construction persist, when the complexities of the NPs are manipulated?

a. Ib gav en gammel klog man med rød hat æblet“Ib gave an old wise man with a red hat the apple”

b. Ib gav den gamle kloge man med rød hat et æble“Ib gave the old wise man with a red hat an apple”

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Experiment 2 (currently running)

Conditions (appear in a def-indef and an indef-def version, 5x2):

a. Ib gave the man an apple b. Ib gave the old, wise man an applec. Ib gave the old wise man with a hat an appled. Ib gave the man an apple from Brazile. Ib gave the man a very big, red apple from Brazil

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. Harald Baayen (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.