3.1.4. Items
3.1.3. Items
The text passages used in the experiment are called ‘items’. Each item contains a few sentences of context and ends with a sentence containing two alternative dative forms. Example (1) illustrates an item:
It turned out that my brother-in-law's daughter had ponies at a certain place near Chester, and it caught on fire and they got out there and got all the ponies out,
A: and these people were so happy that they gave this pony to her points
B: and these people were so happy that they gave her this pony points
for saving the rest of them.
I chose 15 out of the 30 items that Bresnan and Ford used for their 100-split task and simplified them. First, I excluded items which contain verbs that do not occur in at least one other item, because the factor verb sense is thus not representative. Next, I eliminated items that might cause difficulties in understanding. I also left out irrelevant context and reduced features of spoken language such as like and you know. As the pupils are taught British English, I replaced American English expressions such as curbside by their equivalent in British English (kerbside). The changes did not influence the factors impacting on the dative choice, but reduced the difficulty of the sentences and the time needed to fill in the questionnaire. The intention behind this was to increase the return rate of the questionnaires, especially since the participants were not paid.
As for the structure of the questionnaire, the dative forms are evenly distributed – in eight items, the prepositional dative is placed first whereas the remaining seven items show the alternative of the double object first. Moreover, the first alternative is, according to the model formula, sometimes the more, sometimes the less natural one and the different verbs (give, sell, teach) are evenly distributed.
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