A Study of Dative Alternation in Written and Spoken German Registers Focusing on the Verb 'Schreiben'

Soonha Hwang. 2024. A Study of Dative Alternation in Written and Spoken German Registers: Focusing on the Verb ‘Schreiben’. Language and Information 28.2, 1-20. This study deals with the ‘dative alternation’ of the German verb schreiben. To determine which factors affect the dative alternation of schreiben, linguistic data from the DWDS Reference Corpus of the 20th century are analysed with logistic regression and additional data collected from spoken corpora is utilized to compare written and spoken language uses of the verb. It is found that word order is the most important factor in the dative alternation of schreiben and that several others such as pronominality, concreteness and information structure are also relevant. In contrast, factors known to be important in dative alternation, such as word length, animacy and definiteness are not significant based on these data, pointing to the specificity of the verb schreiben in dative alternation. To compare the different registers of written and spoken German, a hierarchical cluster analysis was carried out, from which it was found that dative alternation in German varies greatly depending on the register and that the conceptual spoken registers prefer the dative object. This suggests that not only intra-linguistic factors such as pronominality and information structure, but also extra-linguistic factors such as register play a significant role in construction choice of the dative alternation in German.