Head Adjacency and the Danish Dative Alternation

The production of the Danish dative alternation is investigated in a corpus study, which shows that animacy, definiteness, pronominality and length all influence word order. The study demonstrates, however, that definiteness and animacy have a weaker influence than pronominality and length. Two subsequent behavioural experiments investigate whether length had an impact on comprehension. A rating experiment showed no significant difference between short‐before‐long and long‐before‐short orders. A speeded acceptability judgment experiment showed a reaction time difference between the same two orders iff the length difference is two words. To account for the absence of such a difference when the length difference is four words, we suggest that the increased predictability of the second DP reduces the cost of having a long argument before a short one.