3.1.3. Experiment

3.1.2. Experiment

I gave the participants a questionnaire which made them rate the naturalness of alternative dative forms. The questionnaire contains questions on the participants’ personal details, an instruction and a task featuring several sentences with datives. The instruction does not mention dative alternation but only explains that the project is interested in different ways of saying the same thing in informal conversation in English. Furthermore, it emphasizes that ratings can neither be good nor bad because the project is interested in the participants’ intuitions about language. As for the task, I slightly changed Bresnan’s and Ford’s 100-split task and made the participants distribute 10 instead of 100 points between the double object and the prepositional dative in each of the sentences.2 This was supposed to facilitate the decision.

2  I am going to use figures instead of words for numbers between 0 and 12 in order to be consistent and facilitate reading.

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