The dative alternation in German

Abstract

Many ditransitive events can be expressed in German using either the indirect object construction (IOC) or the prepositional object construction (POC). While most previous research on ditransitives in German has focused on the IOC, very little attention has been paid to the much rarer POC or to individual verb biases for the IOC vs. the POC. We investigated structural preferences of native speakers of German using elicited production and acceptability judgment studies. The results show that the POC is not as restricted as previously thought, and that different modalities (i.e., production vs. comprehension) reveal different aspects of verb biases, which can be easily missed when relying on one type of data.