Background of the Study My friend said My friend said They don‟t tend to make

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The background is presented in this chapter to get a preview of the concept of ditransitivity including dative and benefactive constructions before the researcher goes into the discussion of the linguistic features that affect the choice of the structures. The background covers some overviews of traditional linguistic towards benefactive constructions. In addition, it presents the problem faced by language users to the choice of benefactive alternations. In the final sections, problem limitations, research questions, research objectives, and research benefits are presented. Generally, the chapter presents the difficulty of the choice of benefactive constructions.

1.1 Background of the Study

Ditransitive verbs are defined as verbs with double-object construction Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985. Yet, the definition has interesting consequences. A non-native English speaker may often find difficulties in using verbs with double-object construction. A construction with SVOO structure or Subject + Verb + Object 1 + Object 2 as in the example below shows one of the difficulties: 1

a.My friend said

me Hi . S V O1 O2 2 Although semantically acceptable, the verb said in dative sentence 1 is grammatically unacceptable unless it is paraphrased into

b. My friend said

Hi to me . S V O2 to O1PP In other dative example below, the verb brought requires two obligatory objects to be grammatical. When omitting the theme some apples or the recipient me, the construction will be judged as ungrammatical. 2 He brought me some apples . Similarly, the construction of benefactive has been quite troublesome for some of language users. Often the language users get confused of what construction to use, whether it is benefactive PP or double object construction. 3

a. They don‟t tend to make

you as much money . b. They don‟t tend to make as much money for you . The two constructions in example 3 show that benefactive construction seems to be alterable. The problem arises whether the choice of construction is purely free for the language users to choose, or certain formula for the pattern should be obeyed. Theoretical linguistics traditionally relies on linguistic intuition such as grammatical judgment for such data Bresnan 2010. The certain grammatical pattern like benefactive construction for instance, possesses certain pattern to be remembered. The language users have no chance to freely alter their own construction. As by doing so, the language users are predicted to end up in 3 producing ungrammatical construction. Even then, when they are attempted with much language exposure, the language users still do not understand how to construct such alternation in relatively grammatical forms. In traditional linguistics such problem of benefactive construction is considered to be complex and difficult to deal with. Some would even consider this benefactive alternation problem uninteresting for linguistic theory. Yet, due to the immense growth of computer-readable texts and recordings, nam ely „corpus‟ which provide source for the analysis, such problem seems to be solvable. The very method with the more comprehensible analysis and explanation of such grammatical patterns is needed. The researchers can explore the natural language use written in corpus machine, thus it gives chance of the naturally proper usage of certain patterns. The problem of how language users decide which structure to use has become the subject matter of many researchers in various fields. The approaches include syntactic Quirk et al. 1972, semantic Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004, and discourse Collins 1995. In addition, certain kind of research method, which is probabilistic models for language, has been rapidly developed. In this probabilistic model approach, the research is done based on the real use of grammatical construction mostly in natural settings to predict the probability of the occurrences of certain constructions. Bresnan et al. 2007 have applied such probabilistic approach to explain dative alternation in the language produced by adult speakers in American English. Theijssen et al. 2009 applied similar approach to the data set of benefactive construction of adult and child data. Both Bresnan and Theijssen provide the results of significant features in dative and 4 Benefactive. Yet, they did not happen to compare the relevant features of dative and benefactive. The shared and un-shared linguistic features of the two constructions remain a mystery. In computing the probability of occurrences like dative and benefactive alternations, many models can be employed. To predict the probability of occurrences of certain occurrence in this case construction, simple linear regression model, mix-effect linear regression model, multinomial regression model, simple binary logistic model, and mix-effects binary logistic model can be applied Sunyoto 2007 ; Suharjo 2008. Some formula of probabilistic model can be employed in predicting the occurrences of the alternations including Friedman Tukey, Normit, and Logit Methods. Yet, these plenty of choice sometimes baffle the researcher to which models and methods should be done to the certain probabilistic grammar research. In Bresnan ‟s 2007 dative construction, thirteen features appear to be significant to the choice of dative. They include animacy of recipient, pronominality of recipient, discourse givenness of recipient, semantic class „transfer‟, definiteness of recipient, plurality of theme, person of recipient, givenness of theme, structural parallelism in dialogue, pronominality of theme, syntactic complexity, semantic class „communication‟, and definiteness of theme. Despite the fact that both dative and benefactive are ditransitive constructions, a question appears whether or not both construction share similar relevant linguistic features that affect the choice of their constructions. To respond to the challenge of how to deal with the benefactive construction in a relatively easy and understandable way and to answer the 5 question of what linguistic features affecting dative and benefactive construction, this present research on probabilistic benefactive construction using binary logistic models is conducted. Using the similar models used by Bresnan et al. 2007 and Theijssen et al. 2009 , the present research focuses on different data set which are benefactive and dative from COHA. The different data set which is used by the present research is due to the amount of instances taken. While Bresnan used 1260 instances of dative and Theijssen employed 143 instances of benefactive, this research uses 400 instances of benefactive in COHA along with 80 instances of benefactive and dative in TIME for cross-validation and external validation tests. This fair amount of instances is taken with the time reason. Bresnan works on dative only, and Theijssen does research on benefactive in adult and child data, this very research compute the data of benefactive construction and compare the results with the dative alternation. This research focuses on written text produced by native speakers of American English. The problem with the choice of ditransitive constructions both benefactive and dative has tempted the researcher to do the research on the alternations. The inability and or the obscurity of the low-proficient and non-native English language users to deal with the constructions have encouraged the researcher more. The research is considered important because on the top of that the construction has been proven troublesome for the native language users of English who rely much on their language intuition Bresnan 2010. 6

1.2 Problem Limitations