Abstract:This study investigates how givenness and animacy influence object order (IO-DO vs. DO-IO) in ditransitive constructions in Croatian child language. We have conducted an elicitation task with 59 monolingual Croatian children (mean age = 4;4) and 36 adult controls (mean age = 21), in which the participants were asked to describe images depicting ditransitive actions. These actions differed with regard to givenness (DO given, or IO given) and animacy (IO animate, or both IO and DO animate). Both groups demonstrated an animacy effect, manifested as a significant increase of DO-IO productions when both objects were animate, compared to when only the IO was; adults presented DO-IO preference at ceiling level. Givenness had a statistically significant effect (p-value < 0.01) only in adults, but both groups were affected by the givenness of the DO. This paper supplies arguments to support previous indications that (1) DO-IO is the underlying order in Croatian ditransitives, and (2) that children do not have an IO-DO preference as has been reported by previous studies conducted on case-marking languages.

中文翻译：

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克罗地亚语儿童语言中生命力和被给予性对客体顺序的影响

摘要：本研究调查了在克罗地亚儿童语言的双及物结构中，给予性和生命力如何影响宾语顺序（IO-DO vs. DO-IO）。我们对 59 名单语克罗地亚儿童（平均年龄 = 4；4）和 36 名成人对照（平均年龄 = 21）进行了一项启发式任务，其中要求参与者描述描绘双及物行为的图像。这些动作在给定性（DO 给定，或 IO 给定）和动画性（IO 动画，或 IO 和 DO 动画）方面有所不同。两组都表现出动画效果，表现为当两个对象都是动画时，与只有 IO 时相比，DO-IO 生产显着增加；成年人在天花板水平上呈现 DO-IO 偏好。Givenness 仅在成人中具有统计学显着影响（p 值 < 0.01），但两组都受到 DO 的影响。本文提供了支持先前迹象的论据，即 (1) DO-IO 是克罗地亚双及物语的基本顺序，以及 (2) 儿童没有 IO-DO 偏好，正如先前对案例标记语言进行的研究所报告的那样.