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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 30:3 (2025) ► pp.265–295

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Examining contextual constraints on the English dative alternation in L2 written production

A contrastive multifactorial analysis

ORCiD logo with link | The Australian National University
ORCiD logo with link | Zhejiang University
Published online: 19 August 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.23044.gan
Abstract
This study examines how contextual factors influence the English dative alternation in written production by Chinese EFL learners, with native English usage serving as the benchmark for comparison. The dataset contained 2,492 tokens of the dative alternation (e.g. They give us books vs. They give books to us), extracted from a British English corpus and a Chinese learner English corpus, respectively. Seven probabilistic constraints of the constituents were annotated: length, complexity, pronominality, definiteness, animacy, person, and concreteness. Mixed-effects logistic regression analyses revealed substantial similarities in the core probabilistic grammar of the dative alternation between British English and Chinese learner English. However, the impact of pronominality, definiteness, and person differed. These findings suggest that L2 learners are capable of discerning contextual cues within implicit input and incorporating them into their own language usage. Nevertheless, the degree to which these cues can be acquired varies with input features and processing limitations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Contextual factors influencing the dative alternation in English and Chinese
    • 2.1The dative alternation in L1 English
    • 2.2The dative alternation in Chinese
    • 2.3The dative alternation in L2 English
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2Data extraction and the variable context
    • 3.3Annotation of the explanatory variables
      • 3.3.1Length of recipients and themes (label: WeightRatio)
      • 3.3.2Syntactic complexity of recipients and themes (labels: RecComplexity and ThemeComplexity)
      • 3.3.3Pronominality of recipients and themes (labels: RecPron and ThemePron)
      • 3.3.4Definiteness of recipients and themes (labels: RecDefiniteness and ThemeDefiniteness)
      • 3.3.5Animacy of recipients and themes (labels: RecAnimacy and ThemeAnimacy)
      • 3.3.6Concreteness of themes (label: ThemeConcreteness)
      • 3.3.7Person of recipients (label: RecPerson)
      • 3.3.8Verb lemma (label: VerbLemma)
      • 3.3.9Verb sense (label: VerbSense)
      • 3.3.10Head of recipients and themes (labels: RecipientHead and ThemeHead)
      • 3.3.11Text identification (label: TextID)
    • 3.4Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Model summary
    • 4.2Main effects
    • 4.3Interaction effects
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Implications and limitations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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