Dataset abstract

The dataset contains the ratings for a 100-split task performed by Russian learners of English. 272 Russian learners were subdivided into two groups. One group rated 25 English sentences containing the dative alternation taken from the British National Corpus (BNC), the other group rated 25 Russian sentences (translations of the English ones) with the ditransitive alternation. The English sentences with the double object construction were translated into Russian sentences with the equivalent recipient/dative-theme /accusative order, while the English sentences with the to-dative construction were translated with the equivalent theme/accusative-Recipient/dative order. The dataset contains information about the Participants (Age, Gender, Year of Study, Study domain), the test Sentences (the reference to the BNC, the sentences in both languages, the observed dative construction in the BNC, and its main verb), and the Ratings for each Sentence by each Participant. The replication R code is additionally shared together with the output as an html-file.

Article abstract

Ditransitive verbs include a “recipient” and a “theme” argument (in addition to the subject). The choice of putting one argument before the other (i.e., either recipient-theme, or theme-recipient) is associated with multiple discourse-pragmatic factors. Languages have different options to code the ditransitive construction. In English, a ditransitive verb can take two alternating patterns (“the dative alternation”): the Double Object Construction (DOC) (John gives Mary a book) and the to-dative construction (to-dative) (John gives a book to Mary). In Russian, theme and recipient are marked by accusative and dative, respectively. In addition, word order is flexible and either the accusative-marked theme (Pjotr dal knigu Marii), or the dative-marked recipient (Pjotr dal Marii knigu) can come first. This article reports on two sentence rating experiments (acceptability judgments) to test whether Russian learners of English transfer their preferences about the theme-recipient order in Russian to the ditransitive construction in English. A total of 272 Russian students were tested. Results for both tests showed a great variability in the ratings. A comparison of the ratings seems to suggest a small positive correlation, but no statistically significant relation was found between the order preferences in both languages. However, we found a small preference for the use of the to-dative, which we relate to the language acquisition process as proposed by Processability Theory

R, R version 4.2.3

RStudio, RStudio 2023.06.0+421 "Mountain Hydrangea"

BNCweb can be accessed via http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk.

Examples of usage taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) were obtained and are redistributed under the terms stated in the Terms section of this dataset.