Data extraction and manual revisions

Notepad++ software was used to match the construction of interest using regular expressions. Table 3.1 provides an overview of the abbreviations used for parsing. In the case of the two variants of particle placement, every particle that occurs in a location immediately following or preceding a noun phrase that is an argument of the main verb phrase was identified. Syntactic idiosyncrasies of the main verb were not acknowledged because a verb’s tense, aspect, and mood do not seem to have an effect on priming (Gries, 2005, p. 390; Pickering & Branigan, 1998, p. 645). The particle placement search pattern retrieved all the instances where a choice had been made between a VP NP PRT and a VP PRT NP.

Table 3.1: an overview of the abbreviations used for parsing

Label Meaning

VP Verb Phrase

NP Noun Phrase

TO to

VB Verb, base form

VBP Verb, non3rd person singular present VBZ Verb, 3rd person singular present VBD Verb, past tense

VBG Verb, gerund or present participle VBN Verb, past participle

PRT Particle

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The regular expressions for particle placement pattern search are as follows: For a post-verbial particle, the regular expression is: VP (TO VB|VB.?) PRT NP The regular expression for a particle in a final position is: VP (TO VB|VB.?) NP PRT Example (39) shows the two variants of particle placement in L2 data after they have been parsed and retrieved using the regular expression search pattern above.

(39) Speaker A: He kept taking money out. NP VP VBD VP VBG NP PRT

Speaker B: He saw all the waiters beating up this one client NP VP VBD NP VP VBG PRT NP

The regular expression formula for a dative alternation pattern search: For prepositional datives: VP (TO VB|VB.?) NP PP

For double objects: VP (TO VB|VB.?) NP NP

Example (40) shows the dative alternation variants in two sentences after they have been parsed and retrieved using the regular expression formulas.

(40) English 10: He ordered her some beans NP VP VBD NP NP

German 27: He gave this money to the girl NP VP VBD NP PP

The regular expression for the caused-motion construction is: VP (TO VB|VB.?) NP PPd

The small case letter ‘d’ was used to indicate to the path that the theme moves along (see 2.11.5)

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Example (41) shows two examples of the caused-motion construction following the parsing the retrieval processes:

(41) English 142: He throws it on the table like all upset NP VP VBZ NP PPd

German 202/77: He puts the money on the little tray NP VP VBZ NP PPd

As pointed out in section 2.11 the agent is a shared argument for all the target constructions examined in this thesis. However, for the sake of convenience, I will leave the NP agent arguments from the reorientations of the target constructions in the following chapters. The particle placement variants will be represented as VP NP PRT or VP PRT NP. The dative alternation variants will be represented as either VP NP NP or VP NP PP. Finally, the caused-motion construction will be represented as VP NP PPd.

The extracted target constructions were manually revised for potential tagger errors. The manual revisions of the automatic parsing were extremely important because it helped maintain examples of the target constructions that the automatic parser would have not caught. For example, Figure 3.6 shows an example of the double object and the particle placement construction in the same sentence. Figure 3.6: German 31: intervening material between the arguments of the particle placement construction

Sentence (304) has two target alternations, i.e. dative alternation and particle placement for the same main verb lemma. While the arguments of the double object

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construction are adjacent to each other in sentence (304), the particle ‘back’ is separated from the main verb lemma and the subject that make up the particle placement structure. Therefore, by checking the parsing against the original text, it was possible to catch similar examples by eye and parse them manually.

The search for the double object construction using the regular expression formula outlined above would not have caught examples of the double object as the one in Figure 3.7.

Figure 3.7: German 67: intervening particle between the arguments of the double object construction

What we can see in sentence (272) is that a German speaker produced a double object construction with the particle ‘back’ breaking the order of the construction. The particle ‘back’ occurred between the recipient and theme arguments of the double object construction. Because this kind of examples could not be caught by the automatic formula, it was caught by eye as I was revising the parsing against the original transcriptions.

By the same token, it was possible through manual revisions to detect and remove examples that the automatic parsing would have considered genuine cases of the double object construction (see Figure 3.8).

Figure 3.8: German 54: detecting false examples of the double object construction

The automatic parsing would have analysed the ‘pay your bill yourself’ sentence as a main verb followed by a compliment of two noun phrases, which the automatic

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search would have picked up as a genuine double object construction example. However, ‘yourself’ is not a recipient for money to be paid. The transfer of the payment will be received by the waiter at the restaurant and not by Charlie, who will be making the payment. This example, therefore, was not considered as a double object construction.

The manual checking of the parsing was also helpful in detecting and analysing double object constructions that are not straightforward (see Figure 3.9).

Figure 3.9: German 209: detecting and analysing double object constructions that are not straightforward

Sentence (26) includes a non-ditransitive use of the man verb “tell”. Instead of the usual dative alternation, the recipient is expressed with the pronoun ‘him’, and then followed by the prepositional phrase argument with “about” expressing the content matter of the speech. The speech itself is not mentioned. Alternation, the key feature of the dative construction, is not present: It is not acceptable to say ‘*tell [about Z] [to X]’. I analysed this construction as a double object construction where the head of the second (direct) object NP has been elided: so ‘tell [X] [about Z]’ is implicitly ‘tell [X] [some things about Z]’ where the about-PP is then a modifier of ‘things’ and then the alternation would be possible: ‘tell [some things about X] [to Z]’.

To summarize, it was possible through this corpus analysis to retrieve examples of cases of the target constructions that are not straightforward. Such cases are usually not targeted in experimental investigations of syntactic priming, where the focus often lies on prime-target sentences with straightforward alternations. The next section will

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provide an overview of the computational steps used in quantifying priming and answering the research questions of the thesis.