The effect of context on dative position

Abstract The putative freedom of dative position in English sentences is questioned. In terms of the distribution of Given and New information in discourse, it is hypothesized that in certain (‘motivating’) contexts, dative position is highly constrained, while in other (‘non motivating’) contexts, it is not. An experiment is reported which tests such a hypothesis by means of a recognition memory task for sentences in different types of contexts. It was found that subjects are indeed sensitive to changes in dative position in motivating contexts but not in nonmotivating contexts. The results provide experimental support for the Given-New strategy of information distribution. Furthermore it is argued that such a strategy can be extended to numerous other syntactic phenomena, and it is concluded that a sentence-bound grammatical description is inadequate to represent such facts, while an alternative formal system sensitive to discourse phenomena can handle the facts in a natural and revealing way.

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