Alternating Constructions with Ditransitive Geben in Present-Day German

This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation of the verb geben in two alternating ditransitive constructions in present-day German with the Recipient either coded in the dative case (the indirect object construction, abbreviated: IOC) or by means of the PP an + accusative case (the prepositional object construction, POC). The study is based on a quantitative analysis of N=1,301 sentences (712 IOC and 589 POC) drawn from the Deutsche Referenzkorpus (IDS, Mannheim) which were annotated for 20 factors. Using a logistic regression analysis, we found evidence for the effect of 10 predictors (bootstrapped C-index=95%). We discuss our results in comparison to corpus-based research of the English dative alternation and point to some notable differences between both languages. In German, POC appears to be strongly correlated with collective recipients, collective agents, passive voice, and concrete and propositional transfer senses of the main verb geben. With regard to the semantics of geben, we argue that the quantitative findings are best accounted for on the basis of a general underspecified verb meaning 'geben transfer' that does not yet differentiate between the three possible verb senses (concrete, abstract, and propositional).