3.2.4. Verbs

Results

Let us now examine two peculiarities. Concerning verbs, it is remarkable that items 7 and 11 with the verbs sell and item 12 with the verb teach receive relatively low ratings. The average probability of the prepositional dative is 31.90% for item 12 (as opposed to 87.68% in the corpus model) and 45.70% for item 11 (as opposed to 86.16%). For item 7, the participants’ average rating is higher than the corpus probability (31.50% vs. 15.16%), but in the context of the moderate ratings of the participants it has the second lowest rating. This is all the more remarkable as the verb sell promotes the prepositional dative according to the model formula. Only item 10, which contains the verb teach, constitutes an exception because it is rated with the third highest value of 70.10%.

Discussion

For items 7, 11 and 12, German learners of English seem to prefer the double object dative with the verbs teach and sell. As dative alternation occurs most frequently with give (cf. Arnold, Losongco, Wasow, Ginstrom 2000: 35), it may be that the participants are less familiar with the dative alternation for other verbs, and, for some reason, regard the double object dative as the first option. The high rating of item 10 may be due to the correlating high length difference of 1.95, the indefinite recipient and the previous prepositional dative.

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