A major argument against the feasibility of reconstructing syntax for proto-stages is the widely discussed lack of directionality of syntactic change. In a recent typology of changes in argument structure constructions based on Germanic (Barðdal 2015), several different, yet opposing, changes are reported. These include, among others, processes sometimes called dative sickness, nominative sickness, and accusative sickness. In order to tease apart the roles of the different processes, we have carried out a phylogenetic trait analysis on a predefined data set of twelve predicates found across the Germanic phyla using the MULTISTATE method. This is, as far as we are aware, the first application of the MULTISTATE method (Pagel et al. 2004) in historical syntax. The results clearly favor one of the models, the dative sickness model, over any other model, as this model is the only one that can accurately account for both the observed diversity of case frames and the independently proposed philological reconstructions. Methods of evolutionary trait analysis can be used to model evolutionary paths of argument structure constructions, and they provide the perfect testing ground for hypotheses arrived at through philological reconstruction, based on classical historical-comparative methods.*

This article reports the results of a study of the syntactic acquisition of nine participants in a short-term study abroad program that was designed to complete the second year of German. Data compared study abroad students' use of accusative and dative case prepositions and ditransitives, auxiliary selection in the past tense, and dative verbs with the use of those constructions by students who completed the second-year course sequence at the home institution. The study abroad students performed at about the same level as the on-campus students on all syntactic measures but produced many more ditransitive clauses.

One of the functions of the dative is to mark non-prototypical subjects, i. e. subjects that somehow deviate from the agentive prototype. The Germanic languages, as all subbranches of Indo-European (cf. Barðdal et al. 2012. Reconstructing constructional semantics: The dative subject construction in Old Norse‐Icelandic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Russian and Old Lithuanian.

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In order to test the efficacy of using cooperation scripts in combination with animations to teach the passive in an advanced language classroom, we designed an intervention study with two groups. The first group received instruction with animations on the grammatical structure of the passive and the second group received the same instruction and animations as the first group, but in addition they were given a cooperation script to use in their small group work. The study uses a quasi-experimental design with a post-test and delayed post-test. The learners were university students in advanced German who had received classroom instruction and spent time in a German-speaking country. Therefore, they had explicit instruction on the morphology and function of the passive as is customary in first- and second-year textbooks for English-speaking learners. This study shows that students with the cooperation script perform better on open-ended tasks than students who worked independently.