3.2.5. Pronominal themes

Results

Item 12 yields the highest difference (55.78 percentage points) between the corpus probability (87.68%) and the participants’ average rating (31.90%). For item 11, the participants’ average rating (45.70%) is again much lower than the corpus probability (86.16%). Both items contain a pronominal theme, which, according to the model formula, should strongly promote the prepositional dative. The other two items containing pronominal themes (14 and 15) are rated highest.

Discussion
Of course, it may be that German speakers are not very sensitive to pronominal themes, so that the other factors such as the verb teach in item 12 are responsible for the ratings. However, I would argue that the forms of the pronouns, between which Bresnan and Ford do not differentiate, play a role, too. Item 12 contains the pronominal theme anything, item 11 something, item 15 ours and item 14 it. The indefinite pronouns anything and something contain the word thing and thus seem closer to nouns than the possessive pronoun ours and the personal pronoun it. Moreover, if length was measured in letters or syllables instead of words, they would yield a higher length difference. Those may be reasons why the participants consider the double object dative more acceptable with anything and something than with it and ours. This example shows that creating categories such as pronouns and length can influence the results. However, researchers need those categories to gain an overview of the mass of factors and detect connections between them. Therefore, it is only necessary to remember that such categories are artificial.

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