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

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.