Vortrag: Grammatical variation in young German learner English

While advanced EFL learners have been shown to be sensitive to many of the same factors as native speakers in their production and comprehension of the dative alternation, research on less advanced learners is lacking. In my doctoral dissertation I aim to gain insight into the way early learners acquire these probabilistic constraints, by examining the production of the dative and benefactive alternations in the writing of young German learners of English.

The dative alternation (1) and the closely related benefactive alternation (2) are examples of grammatical variation in English, where two grammatical structures represent the same semantic content.
 


(1)       Dative alternation (to-dative)



  • Prepositional construction (PC): John gave the book to Mary.

  • Double object construction (DOC): John gave Mary the book.


(2)        Benefactive alternation (for-dative)



  • Prepositional construction (PC): Emma bought a gift for her friend.

  • Double object construction (DOC): Emma bought her friend a gift.


 


The acceptability of a particular form is influenced by a number of probabilistic constraints, including semantic properties of the recipient and theme, contextual factors, phonological factors, and processing-related factors (Bresnan & Ford 2010). Multifactorial analyses of the dative alternation in EFL suggest that advanced learners are sensitive to many of the same factors as native speakers, (e.g. Lee et al. 2015; Jäschke & Plag 2016), however, research is lacking on beginner/lower intermediate EFL learners.


For German EFL learners, two potentially key influences exist in tension: ease of processing might predict a preference for the PC form, while transfer effects might predict a DOC preference (Jäschke & Plag 2016). Thus, in my doctoral dissertation I aim to investigate the production of the dative and benefactive alternations in young German learner English, to gain insight into the early stages of acquisition of probabilistic constraints.


Data will be extracted from the corpus of Young German Learner English (Bracke et al. 2024), which is currently being compiled. I will use the MuPDAR approach (Gries & Deshors 2014, Gries 2022) to compare learners’ production to native speakers’ predicted choices in the same context. This will allow for very fine-grained analyses, revealing which probabilistic constraints beginner/intermediate learners are sensitive to and whether either form of the alternations is overrepresented in their production.


 


References


Bracke, L., Stoddard, B., Fuchs, R., Rosen, A. & Werner, V. (2024, March 21–22). Introducing the Corpus of Young German Learner English [Conference presentation]. Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium, Hannover, Germany.


Bresnan, Joan & Ford, Marilyn. (2010). Predicting Syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English. Language, 86.1, 168-213.


Gries, Stefan Th. (2022). MuPDAR for corpus-based learner and variety studies: two (more) suggestions for improvement. In Susanne Flach & Martin Hilpert (eds.), Broadening the spectrum of corpus linguistics: New approaches to variability and change, 257-283. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.


Gries, Stefan Th. & Deshors, Sandra C. (2014). Using regressions to explore deviations between corpus data and a standard/target: two suggestions. Corpora 9(1). 109-136.


Jäschke, Katja., & Plag, Ingo. (2016). THE DATIVE ALTERNATION IN GERMAN-ENGLISH INTERLANGUAGE. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(3), 485–521. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26330930.


Lee, Yong-hun, Yook, Cheongmin, Lee, Bomi, & Park, Yeonkyung. (2015). Factors involved in Korean EFL learners’ choice of English dative constructions. English Teaching, 70(4), 137-157.

Info

Tag: 22.11.2024
Anfangszeit: 11:15
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: 00A02 CNMS
Track: Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft
Sprache: en

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