3.4. Outlook

For reasons of limited space and methodical knowledge (see above), this study could not capture all interesting aspects related to the topic. The next logical step would be to investigate the influence of the German language. My study examines which variables may have the strongest influence on Germans’ intuitions about dative alternation, whereas an analysis by a linguist specialised in English and German might find out why some variables are more influential than others. A large-scale study might even investigate the influence of other varieties of English and foreign languages on intuitions about dative alternation and create a linguistic map showing the differences. Such an extensive study might also use all three psycholinguistic methods in order to mirror the speakers’ intuitions about language better. Finally, dative alternation could be examined in written English. These are just some examples of future research topics concerning dative alternation for which methods from corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics could be applied.

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