19
length. This measure will result in an ordinal value, in the form of a continuous variable. The examples below illustrate the feature syntactic complexity See also
Appendix 1 and 2.
7.
he said. Really, its the old cliche -- I play them one game at a time.
Elliott, the wide receiver, Its a lot of fun. verb
:
plays
theme :
one game 1 2 log scale
– counted based on the number of words, for
example the theme
one game
is 2 log scale as it consists of 2 words
beneficiary :
them 1 log scale
Length different = beneficiary length – theme length
= 1 – 2
= -1 log scale
2.2.3 Animacy of Theme and Beneficiary
Animacy is another important predictor affecting the English word order. Recent studies claim that animacy is an important cognitive category in humans
with subtle effects on English word order, primarily showing up in variation Thompson 1990, 1995, Rosenbach 2002, Bresnan Hay 2008. These prior
studies suggest that animate constituents appear before inanimate ones. Animate theme prefers prepositional construction, putting the theme in post verbal position.
20
Similarly, inanimate beneficiary favors prepositional construction, putting the inanimate beneficiary in the end of the sentence.
Garretson 2004 classifies the animacy into nine categories-
„human‟, „organization‟, „animal‟, „place‟, „time‟, „concrete‟, „nonconcrete‟, „machine‟, and
„vehicle‟. The choice between human, organization, and nonconcrete depended on how the coders interpreted the referent of the expression. Although guidelines
were given about the difference between human and organization, the cut-off point remains unclear. The categories time and place were defined in a way that
did not go beyond the coders‟ perceptive of them. The time was supposed to refer
to „periods of time‟. Yet, it left the ambiguity as the time sometime was also claimed as nonconcrete.
For Bresnan ‟s 2007 dative data set, animacy was coded in four
categories- „human‟, „organization‟, „animal‟, and „inanimate‟ derived from
Garretson
et al.
2004. The categories „place‟, „time‟, „concrete inanimate‟,
„nonconcrete inanimate‟, „machine‟, and „vehicle‟ were collapsed into a single „inanimate‟ category. The boundary between human and organization followed
the guidelines from Garretson. For this research on benefactive, the researcher follow the animacy coding
system by Bresnan 2010. The animacy of the data was categorized into human or animal, which is animate vs other. This categorization fits the model in use,
which is logistic regression model which require binary variables See the examples below to clarify the idea of animacy of theme and beneficiary See also
Appendices 1 and 2
21
8. Amelia No. Baron. Baron Wildenhain Does not your face glow, when he
makes
you a fine speech
? referring, perhaps, to love or marriage. Amelia verb
:
makes
theme :
a fine speech
: inanimate beneficiary :
you
: animate
2.2.4 Discourse Accessibility of Theme and Beneficiary
