Replication Data for: A corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German (doi:10.18710/CRSJLY)

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Replication Data for: A corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German

doi:10.18710/CRSJLY

DataverseNO

2025-03-20

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Somers, Joren; Leuschner, Torsten; De Cuypere, Ludovic; Barðdal, Jóhanna, 2025, "Replication Data for: A corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German", https://doi.org/10.18710/CRSJLY, DataverseNO, V1

Replication Data for: A corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German

doi:10.18710/CRSJLY

Somers, Joren (Ghent University)

Leuschner, Torsten (Ghent University)

De Cuypere, Ludovic (Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Ghent University)

Barðdal, Jóhanna (Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Ghent University)

Ghent University

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

MS Excel

R

RStudio (Posit Software, PBC)

SketchEngine

DataverseNO

The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing)

De Cuypere, Ludovic

De Cuypere, Ludovic

2023-10-04

https://doi.org/10.18710/CRSJLY

Arts and Humanities, German, Nominative, Dative, Alternating constructions, Argument structure construction, Corpus-based linguistics, Mixed-effects logistic regression, Dat-Nom alternation, experiential verb, experiential construction, unaccusative, unaccusative verb, mixed-effects logistic regression, dative subject, word order, argument structure

<p><b>Dataset abstract</b></p> <p>The dataset includes an annotated sample of N = 13292 German written sentences with a Nominative and a Dative argument. The sentences comprise 76 different verbs taking two alternating object orders: 5591 sentences occur with the Dat-Nom order, 8701 sentences occur with the Nom-Dat order. Each sentence is annotated for Object order, the sentence Verb and several features related to both objects, including: (pro)nominality, pronoun type, referentiality, person, number, definiteness, animacy, and length. The sentences and the two objects are shared in a separate .csv-file. An R Notebook with the data analysis is provided as well as an html file with both the R code and output for the analysis.</p>

<p><b>Article abstract</b></p> <p>A subgroup of German Nom-Dat verbs have received considerable attention in the literature due to the propensity of the dative to occur preverbally, which is unexpected on an object analysis of the dative (see references below). Here we argue for an alternative analysis, namely that the relevant verbs alternate between two different argument structures, Dat-Nom and Nom-Dat, and hence that either argument, the dative or the nominative, may be the syntactic subject. Earlier studies have shown that topicalisation of direct arguments is found in ca. 4–12% of the cases in German texts. For comparison, we have extracted 13,000 tokens of 76 verbs from the deTenTen13 corpus and coded them for ten different variables. Our findings support an alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat analysis for these verbs, as 42% of the tokens instantiate the Dat-Nom order and the remnant 58% instantiate the Nom-Dat order. In contexts with full NPs only, the share of Dat-Nom tokens is even higher, 46% compared to 54% Nom-Dat, which altogether excludes a topicalisation analysis of the Dat-Nom word order. In order to throw further light on the alternation, we carry out a multivariate analysis which confirms the effect of topicality, definiteness, length, the animacy of the dative and the inanimacy of the nominative.</p>

2020-06-01-2022-11-01

Germany, Austria, Switzerland

annotated corpus data

<p>The data was retrieved from the deTenTen corpus, accessed through SketchEngine. For more information about the deTenTen corpus, see: <a href="www.sketchengine.eu/detenten-german-corpus">sketchengine.eu/detenten-german-corpus</a>. For more information about SketchEngine, see: <a href="https://www.sketchengine.eu">sketchengine.eu</a>.</p> <p> References for SketchEngine: </p> <ul> <li>Adam Kilgarriff, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, Vít Suchomel. The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography, 1: 7-36, 2014.</li> <li>Adam Kilgarriff, Pavel Rychlý, Pavel Smrž, David Tugwell. The Sketch Engine. Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress: 105-116, 2004.</li> </ul> <p>The extracted text fragments included in this dataset only represent insubstantial portions of the source listed above, and they do not represent coherent larger texts. Reuse of such excerpts is permitted under exceptions in IPR and database protection regulations, such as Fair use (cf. <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html">US Copyright Act</a>), the <a href="http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/1996/9/oj">EU Database Directive</a> (cf. art 8 Rights and obligations of lawful users), and the Norwegian Copyright Act (cf. <a href="https://lovdata.no/lov/2018-06-15-40/§24">§ 24 Eneretten til databaser</a>).</p>

<p>With the exception of the tabular file GermDatNomOrder_Sentences.csv, the dataset "Replication Data for: A corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German" has been marked as dedicated to the public domain, as described here: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/">https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/</a>.</p> <p>Our <a href="https://dataverse.org/best-practices/dataverse-community-norms">Community Norms</a> as well as good scientific practices expect that proper credit is given via citation. Please use the data citation shown on the dataset page.</p> <p>In the file GermDatNomOrder_Sentences.csv, Column 4 ("Sentence") contains text fragments that have been extracted from the deTenTen corpus under limitations and exceptions to IPR and database protection regulations, and annotated as described in the ReadMe for this dataset. For more information about the deTenTen corpus, see: <a href="www.sketchengine.eu/detenten-german-corpus">sketchengine.eu/detenten-german-corpus</a>.</p> <p>The contribution of the authors of the present dataset to GermDatNomOrder_Sentences.csv (markup in Column 4 and data in all other columns) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, as described here: <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a>. Reusers should note that this license does not apply to the original text fragments extracted from the deTenTen corpus.</p>

Somers, Joren, Torsten Leuschner, Ludovic De Cuypere & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2025. A corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German. <i>Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft</i> 44(2). https://doi.org/10.18148/zs/2025-2009.

10.18148/zs/2025-2009

Somers, Joren, Torsten Leuschner, Ludovic De Cuypere & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2025. A corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German. <i>Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft</i> 44(2). https://doi.org/10.18148/zs/2025-2009.

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0_README_GermDatNomOrder.txt

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GermDatNomOrder_Code.qmd

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A notebook with R code and comments in Quarto format (.Qmd)

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GermDatNomOrder_Data.txt

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This is a tab delimited text file with the annotated data in UTF-8 encoding. Missing values are marked as "NA". ID is a key variable relating this file to GermDatNomOrder_Sentences.txt.

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GermDatNomOrder_Output.html

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An html file with the full R code and code output.

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GermDatNomOrder_Sentences.csv

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This is a csv file with UTF-8 encoding and ";" as delimiter. The file contains the sentences and the constituents that were annotated. The annotations are provided in GermDatNomOrder_Data.txt. ID is a key variable relating GermDatNomOrder_Sentences.csv to GermDatNomOrder_Data.txt.

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