The Effect of Givenness on the Dative Alternation in Norwegian: A Reaction Time Study

The question of what determines the choice of word order in ditransitives has been a long standing one. Several factors have been shown to affect the order of the objects. For example, results from self-paced reading tasks and reaction timed (RT) grammaticality judgements in English and Danish reveal that the double object dative (DOD, Erik gave the girl a car) is better when the recipient is given than when the theme is given, while the prepositional dative (PD, Erik gave the car to the girl) is found to be insensitive to givenness (Bridgwater et al. 2019; Brown et al. 2012; Clifton & Frazier, 2004; Kizach & Balling, 2013). As a result, PD has been argued to be the canonical order. Furthermore, the fact that both word orders are generally accepted suggests that this preference is due to information structure rather than grammaticality.

The current study investigates the alternation between PD and DOD to test whether the same sensitivity to information structure can be found in the dative alternation in Norwegian. We ask: (i) To what extent are ditransitive structures that violate the given-before-new principle accepted as grammatical in Norwegian? (ii) Is this reflected in RTs as in Danish and English? And, (iii), how are violations of given>new perceived when the given object is realized by a pronominal object as opposed to a DP? In our speeded grammaticality judgement task designed in Open Sesame, all test sentences were preceded by a context introducing one of the object arguments; RTs were measured from when the test sentence appeared on the screen, and given elements were expressed by definite DPs or pronouns, while new objects were realized by indefinite DPs. The participants had to rate the sentences as either “good” or “bad”. A total of 96 ditransitive structures were tested on 26 adult native speakers of Norwegian.

The results are summarised in Table 1. and reveal both similarities and differences with previous studies. DODs appear to be more sensitive to information structure than PDs in Norwegian as well: theme-given DODs were consistently regarded as less acceptable (63% and 44%), while recipient-given PDs were judged as less acceptable only when the theme was realised by a pronoun (73%). A linear mixed effects analysis revealed that fewer test items were judged as “bad” in the PD structure (p-value=4,47e-05). Further, our statistical analysis also revealed that items violating given>new are significantly slower than orders obeying this principle: p-value=0,0476 for PD and p-value=0,00938 for DOD; this means that PDs are also context dependent, even if considerably less so than DODs. For PDs, this is surprising, as previous research has shown no tendency related to word order with these structures. The results can be summarized as follows: First, violations of the given>new principle with DODs seem to be less acceptable in Norwegian than in Danish and English (more items judged as “bad”); second, RTs reveal that PDs are also sensitive to information structure (slower RTs when given>new violation); and third, the type of referring expression clearly plays a role when it comes to how degraded violations of givenness principles are considered (both on RTs and acceptance ratio). This shows that pronouns play an important role for word order in ditransitives. The canonical status of the PD may need to be re-evaluated in light of this.

References: Bridgwater, Kyröläinen & Kuperman (2019). The influence of syntactic expectations on reading comprehension is malleable and strategic: An eye-tracking study of English dative alternation. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(3), 179-192. Brown, Savova & Gibson (2012). Syntax encodes information structure: Evidence from on-line reading comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(1), 194-209. Clifton & Frazier (2004). Should given information come before new? Yes and no. Memory & Cognition, 32(6), 886-895. Kizach & Balling (2013). Givenness, complexity, and the Danish dative alternation. Memory & Cognition, 41(8), 1159-1171.