Constraints and lexical conditioning in the dative alternation

Abstract This article presents a cross-linguistic variationist study of the dative alternations in English ( I gave Tom a present vs. I gave a present to Tom ) and Dutch ( Ik gaf Tom een cadeau vs. Ik gaf een cadeau aan Tom ). We use logistic mixed-effects regression and lasso regression to assess the probabilistic conditioning of dative choices as a function of morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic and lexical constraints in both languages. In addition, we test the predictive accuracy of our two language-specific models cross-linguistically. The results show a substantial overlap in the probabilistic constraints, but also a larger reliance on lexical content in Dutch compared to English, which suggests differences in complexity across the English and Dutch dative alternations. The methodology adopted in this study may pave a new way for comparative variational linguistics.