Ditransitive constructions : A challenge for Italian learners of German

Many studies have dealt in full length with ditransitive constructions from a theoretical point of view (Goldberg 1995, 2006; Haspelmath 2004, Malkuchov et al. 2007, Proost 2014, Rauth 2020, Willems 2020, to name just a few) but hardly with the difficulties associated with their learning in a foreign perspective. Our contribution focuses on the German ditransitive construction and the learning issues for Italian-speaking learners of German. In ditransitive constructions prototypical verbs such as geben (‘to give’) are used, they express a transfer semantics and require a dative complement for the recipient and an accusative complement for the theme. However, some German verbs with a similar semantics, such as lehren (‘to teach’), abfragen (‘to interrogate’, ‘to test’) or kosten (‘to cost’) occur with two accusative complements. This is often problematic for learners who tend to overgeneralize (see also Goldberg 2019: 112), especially when these German verbs with two accusative complements correspond to ditransitive verbs in their mother tongue. The first part of our presentation will describe a test with two tasks developed with a collection of ditransitive verbs and verbs with ditransitive semantics but without ditransitive argument structure, taken from the Elektronisches Valenzwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (E-VALBU). It was conducted with Italian bachelor and master students at the University of Milano in order to define the challenging issues related to the learning of German ditransitive constructions. Both tasks revealed that a mere functional description of the ditransitive construction and its constituents is not satisfactory, to explain the idiosyncratic use of German verbs, as it is not always predictable in which construction verbs expressing a transfer occur. Moreover, the correct order between both objects cannot be explained with functional principles either, especially for objects in pronominal form (Lenerz 1977) whose order is fundamentally different in Italian. The second part of our presentation will focus on the issues related to the use of verbs expressing a transfer but with two accusatives, e.g. lehren (‘to teach’; see also Plank 1987) oder abfragen (‘to interrogate’, ’to test’) and the pedagogical applications. As we will show, grammar books and teaching manuals (like Dreyer & Schmitt (2009), Helbig & Buscha (2013), Hentschel & Weydt (2021)) do not address the specificities of these verbs in an efficient way for learners of German. Starting from the observation that these verbs with two accusatives are sometimes used with a dative complement for the recipient/beneficiary instead of an accusative (see also Lang 2007 and Wegener 1985), we want to propose a more differentiated picture about the use of these verbs by looking at corpus data from the Sketchengine that can provide more authentic evidence about the usage possibilities (e.g. sentence in active vs. passive; nominal vs. pronominal complements, etc.). For the learning of the German ditransitive construction, we advocate a usage-based approach which involves corpus data and frequency figures (see also De Knop fc. 2023) to make better decisions about the use of this construction and its specificities. Literature De Knop, Sabine (fc. 2023), The integration of frequency dimensions and lexicalization preferences in contrastive analysis. In Annalisa Baicchi & Cristiano Broccias (Eds.), Constructional and Cognitive Explorations of Contrastive Linguistics. Berlin: Springer. Goldberg, Adele E. (1995), Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele E. (2006), Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Adele E. (2019), Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haspelmath, Martin (2004), Explaining the Ditransitive Person-Role Constraint: A usage-based approach. Constructions 2. Lang, Peter (2007), Grammatik und Norm: Direktes Objekt, indirektes Objekt und der doppelte Akkusativ. Seminararbeit Universität Zürich, Deutsches Seminar zum Thema Grammatik und Norm, Wintersemester 2006/07. Lenerz, Jürgen (1977), Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr. Malchukov, Andrej, Martin Haspelmath & Bernard Comrie (2007), Ditransitive constructions: a typological overview. In Andrej Malchukov, Martin Haspelmath & Bernard Comrie (Hrsg.), Studies in Ditransitive Constructions, 1–64. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Plank, Frans (1987), Direkte indirekte Objekte, oder: Was uns lehren lehrt. Leuvense Bijdragen 76, 37-61. Mollica, Fabio (2010), Syntaktischer Wechsel, Restriktionen und Lesartänderung im Deutschen und im Italienischen. In Fischer, Klaus, Eilika Fobbe and Stefan J. Schierholz (eds.), Valenz und Deutsch als Fremdsprache, 157-182. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Proost, Kristel (2014), Ditransitive transfer constructions and their prepositional variants in German and Romanian: An empirical survey. In Ruxandra Cosma, Stefan Engelberg, Susan Schlotthauer, Speranta Stanescu & Gisela Zifonun (Hrsg.), Komplexe Argumentstrukturen - Kontrastive Untersuchungen zum Deutschen, Rumänischen und Englischen, 19–83. Berlin: De Gruyter. Rauth, Philipp (2020), Ditransitive Konstruktionen im Deutschen: Geschichte und Steuerung der Objektabfolge im Mittelfeld. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. Wegener, Heide (1985), Der Dativ im heutigen Deutsch. Tübingen: Narr. Welke, Klaus (2011), Valenzgrammatik des Deutschen. Eine Einführung. Berlin: de Gruyter. Willems, Klaas (2020), Remarks on the ditransitive construction in German. Sprachwissenschaft 45(2): 141-180. Grammar books and manuals Dreyer, Hilke & Richard Schmitt (2009), Lehr- und Übungsbuch der deutschen Grammatik. Ismaning: Hueber. Helbig, Gerhard & Joachim Buscha (2013), Deutsche Grammatik: Ein Handbuch für den Ausländer-unterricht. München: Langenscheidt. Hentschel, Elke & Harad Weydt (2021), Handbuch der Deutschen Grammatik. Berlin: De Gruyter. Corpora E-VALBU, elektronisches Valenzwörterbuch deutscher Verben, https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/verbvalenz/ SketchEngine, https://www.sketchengine.eu/