An investigation into the use of dative alternation by L1 and Arab L2 users of English

Abdalkarim Zawawi

Lancaster University

[email protected]

 

1. Introduction

 

This paper evaluates the use of the English dative alternation by native English speakers and Arab learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). It is based on corpus data where English ditransitive verbs, that may or may not take a prepositional phrase (PP) as their indirect objects are explored. The dative construction refers to speakers' grammatical choice of using a PP with the preposition 'to' or 'for' as an indirect object to a noun phrase (NP). The alternative construction to the dative case is to use an NP which consists of two objects as a complement to one ditranstive verb like in: 'Michael gave Maria a book' versus 'Michael gave a book to Maria'.

 

2. The present study
    

The use of dative alternation The study investigates the extent to which Arab EFL learners' choices differ from the native English norm in using the dative case. A sub-corpus of 208,645 words of conversation and interviews from the spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC) was compared to a sub-corpus of 154,754 words from the Arabic first language (L1) component of the Longman learner corpus.[1]

These naturally occurring native and learner data allowed the identification of the typical dative alternation use by automatically retrieving occurrences of a wide range of ditransitive verbs such as (give, offer, post, sell, show, throw, send, explain, design, open, ask, buy, contribute, refuse, offer). These verbs accept (a) mainly the dative case (e.g., buy, explain), (b) mainly the double object construction (e.g., wish, refuse), or (c) both constructions (e.g., give, offer) as their complements (Berk, 1999). Importantly, some of these verbs behave differently in Arabic grammar. For example, while it is grammatical to use the double object to complement a ditransitive verb like 'buy' in English, Arabic grammar does not allow a double object complement with the verb 'ishtara' (to buy).

 

3. Results

 

First results indicate that English ditransitive verbs are not identical in their degree of reluctance in accepting the {NP, NP} or {NP, PP} object construction. The verb 'give' showed a considerably higher reluctance to accept the dative case than it did in a similar native English corpus-based study by Gries' (2005) on the dative alternation case.

The verb 'send' showed a similar pattern in the L1 and second language (L2) learner corpora in that it is used considerably higher with a double object rather than the dative case construction. Learners seem to overuse the dative case of 'send' – which can probably be attributed to the fact that the dative case is preferred in Arabic as a completment to the ditransitive verb '2rsala' (to send).

The verb 'explain' showed seemed to have a similar behaviour of resorting to the dative case rather than the double-object construction in both corpora. The reason why Arab learners did not confuse the double object with the dative case may be that Arabic grammar does not allow the double object construction as a complement to the verb 'explain'. Noticeably, most of the individual Arab learners who used the ditransitive form of the verb 'explain' were at a proficient stage of learning English.

An interesting finding is that Arab learners appear to overuse the preferred, 'unmarked' alternative in Arabic grammar, while they underuse the 'unusual' marked ones. This behaviour is apparent in overusing the dative case where Arabic does not allow a double object complement such as the verbs 'send’, ‘buy’ and ‘design'.

 

4. Conclusion and future steps
    

This paper presents an argument that Arab learners deviate in their use of dative alternation from the English norm. It can be argued that they tend to overgeneralise what is the preferred and grammatical norm for dative constructions in their L1 Arabic to their L2 English – a form of negative transfer which refers to erroneous usage that results from a given language interference (Gilquin et al., 2008).

By exploring spoken L1 and L2 data future studies can widen the scope of research on linguistic interference to include more grammatical categories and the extent to which learners rely on their L1 to make their L2 grammatical choices.

I will further investigate Arab learners' English spoken interactions to better understand the role of syntactic priming, i.e: ''… the tendency for a speaker to produce a syntactic structure that occurred in the recent discourse rather than an alternative structure'' (Kim & McDonough, 2008).

 

References

 

Berk, L. (1999). English Syntax from Word to Discourse. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gilquin, G., Papp, S., & Diez-Bedmar, M. (2008). Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research. Amsterdam: Rodopi

Gries, S. T. (2005). Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34(4), 365–399. doi:10.1007/s10936-005-6139-3.

Kim, Y. & McDonough, K. (2008). Learners’ production of passives during syntactic priming activities. Applied Linguistics, 29(1), 149–154. doi:10.1093/applin/ amn004

Conference Title

11th Teaching and Language Corpora

Conference Country

United Kingdom

Conference Date

July 20, 2014 - July 23, 2014

Conference Sponsor

Lancaster University

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