A Multifactorial Study of Dative Alternation in English and Chinese

Dative alternation, common in English and Chinese, refers to the alternation between a prepositional dative construction (e.g.John sent the book to Mary) and a double-object construction (e.g.John sent Mary the book).This paper employs the multifactorial approach to compare the significant factors and their effects between English and Chinese dative alternation.The results show that English and Chinese dative alternation are influenced by many factors and present a hierarchy of factors in English dative alternation, namely, the accessibility of recipient > the length difference between recipient and theme > the pronominality of recipient > the accessibility of theme > the concreteness of recipient > the definiteness of theme; while, a different hierarchy works for Chinese dative alternation, namely, the definiteness of theme > the concreteness of theme > the animacy of recipient.Both languages prefer a prepositional dative construction when a definite theme is used, but the dative alternation of the two languages significantly differs in accessibility and length difference between recipient and theme.