3.2.6. Conclusion

My study shows that average ratings by students and pupils are relatively similar but partly differ strongly from the corpus probabilities. Mostly, their ratings are more moderate than the corpus probabilities. This answers the first research question “to what degree do native language and education influence intuitions about the dative choice?” The German mother tongue affects the ratings by pupils and students, whereas academic education shows no visible effect.

But although the participants’ ratings are more moderate, a closer look at the individual items shows that they are sensitive to many variables – often just to a lesser degree than native speakers. Positive length difference and definite recipients increase the probability of the prepositional dative – definite recipients even seem to have a greater impact on the German participants than on native speakers. In contrast, pronominal recipients and negative length difference decrease the likelihood of a prepositional dative. The verb teach seems to decrease its likelihood more strongly for Germans than for native speakers The verb sell also reduces the probability of a prepositional dative, even though it has the contrary effect on native speakers. Pronominal themes decrease its likelihood as well, but the impact seems to differ depending on the kind of the pronoun. Number of theme and previous datives were not taken into account. Those findings partly answer the second research question “which of the factors determined by Bresnan and Ford have an impact on the dative choice?” However, I could neither examine all factors nor determine how strong the influence of the variables is. Moreover, I could not analyse further peculiarities such as cases where the participants’ average ratings are much higher than the corpus probabilities (see e.g. items 5 and 6). Thus, my study is only concerned with pointing out the most striking tendencies. The fact that I did not analyse factors such as the verb senses of give does therefore not mean that they have no impact.

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