3. Mini-project

My mini-project analyses the same phenomenon as Bresnan and Ford’s study: dative alternation, i.e. the choice between the double object and the prepositional dative. Two groups of German native speakers rated the naturalness of datives in a psycholinguistic experiment resembling Bresnan and Ford’s 100-split task. In order to compare the results with those obtained by Bresnan and Ford, I kept the design of my study as similar as possible to theirs.

Unfortunately, Bresnan and Ford’s study does not offer a list with the ratings of each participant. However, I needed data based on native speakers’ language use in order to detect differences between Germans and native speakers. Therefore, I calculated the corpus probabilities of several sentences from Bresnan’s and Ford’s dataset of datives with the help of their model formula.

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