The role of prosody in the English dative alternation

Does prosody influence the ordering of syntactic constituents? One syntactic phenomenon where prosody has occasionally been suggested to play a role is the English dative alternation. Building on proposals in earlier literature, we present a model of the dative alternation based on prosodic constraints interacting in terms of Optimality Theory. The model predicts the possible constituent orderings as well as the relative well-formedness of each ordering for verb phrases of different prosodic types. Data from two corpora that represent informal written and spoken English show that these predictions are largely confirmed. We conclude that the dative alternation exhibits prosodic effects that are mostly gradient and variable, yet entirely systematic. The prosodic hypothesis is thus a serious contender that must be taken into account in any attempt to explain the dative alternation in English.