This study investigates how foreign language proficiency, which previous corpus-based research on alternation phenomena has largely ignored, influences the choice of genitive variant (the tail of the dog/the dog’s tail) in learners of English as a Foreign Language. The data stems from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, a three-million-word corpus featuring spoken language from low-intermediate to advanced learners of English from several L1 backgrounds. The collected genitive observations were annotated for various constraints such as the length, animacy, definiteness and discourse status of the constituents and then analyzed via mixed-effects logistic regression. The results show that although native speakers and learners are remarkably similar, low-proficiency learners are less sensitive to possessor definiteness and possessor animacy, the latter of which is otherwise the strongest constraint of the genitive alternation.

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This study investigates the effects of lexical complexity on the choice of dative alternants in English and Dutch. The lexical complexity of a given word is operationalized as being proportional to how quickly speakers can retrieve it from their mental lexicon, for which I consult the databases of recent megastudies (Keuleers, Diependaele, and Brysbaert 2010: 1). Following the Complexity Principle (Rohdenburg 1996), which states that cognitively complex environments favour the grammatically more explicit variant in linguistic alternations, it could be expected that lexically complex environments favour prepositional datives. However, the models suggest that speakers’ choices are not particularly sensitive to the complexity of larger linguistic environments. Instead speakers aim to place the lexically easier constituent before the more complex one. This turns out to be one of the strongest predictors in both languages.