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Production of the double object construction: An experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2017

Johannes Kizach
Johannes Kizach*
Affiliation:
Department of English, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. engjk@cc.au.dk
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Abstract

In the double object construction (e.g. the man gave the woman some flowers) a preference has been observed for placing definite arguments before indefinite arguments when both appear post-verbally. In Danish it has been reported that examples with the indefinite–definite order are read more slowly than those with the definite–indefinite order in speeded acceptability judgement tasks, and they are less frequent in corpus texts. This short communication presents a memory recall experiment showing that the preference observed in comprehension and written production is also observed in on-line oral production. Participants produce definite–indefinite orders when attempting to recall definite–indefinite orders in 95% of the cases, but when attempting to recall indefinite–definite orders they alter the definiteness of one or both of the arguments and produce indefinite–definite orders only in 6% of the cases.

Keywords

Danishdefinitenessmemory recallsyntactic processing
Type
Short Communications
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , December 2017 , pp. 373 - 382
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Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2017 

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