Ditransitive argument structure constructions in FLT

Construction Grammar (CxG) has established itself as a fruitful descriptive model not only for theoretical studies but also for applied areas such as foreign language learning (FLL) and teaching (FLT) (see e.g. De Knop & Gilquin (2016) or Ellis & Cadierno (2009)). Prior studies in CxG have dealt in full length with ditransitive constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006) but hardly with the difficulties associated with their learning in a foreign perspective. Our contribution focuses on the German ditransitive construction and the learning and teaching 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 (Welke 2011). But some German verbs with a similar semantics, such as lehren (‘to teach’), occur with two accusative complements. This is often problematic for learners who tend to overgeneralize. With a collection of ditransitive verbs and verbs with ditransitive semantics but without ditransitive argument structure, taken from the Valenzwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (VALBU), a pretest with two types of tasks 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. With the first task students were asked to build sentences with a set of words including a ditransitive verb or a verb with a ditransitive semantics and possible arguments. The second task consisted in a cloze test in which the students had to fill in the two objects in the correct order and with the proper morphosyntactic case. Both tests revealed that a mere constructionist approach is not satisfactory, (i) to explain the idiosyncratic use of German verbs, as it is not always predictable in which construction verbs expressing transfer occur. (ii) Moreover, the correct order between both objects cannot be explained with CxG principles either, especially for objects in pronominal form whose order is fundamentally different in Italian. A pedagogical methodology based on structural priming (De Knop & Mollica 2022; Loebell & Bock 2003) and on chunking (Handwerker & Madlener 2006) can bring some positive effects for the learning of German ditransitive constructions as demonstrated by the results of a posttest with the same groups of students and a similar design as the pretest