Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In all languages, there exist multiple so-called alternations—pairs of constructions with similar truth conditions—such as the dative alternation, which consists of the double object and prepositional-phrase object constructions. Many alternations exhibit an asymmetry such that there is a canonical, general construction and a non-canonical, alternative construction with a different ordering of the verbal arguments. What is the function of such redundant constructions? We tested a proposal by Birner & Ward (2009, 1998) that the non-canonical construction is used to satisfy an information-structural constraint: placing old (given) information before new information in the sentence. In 4 experiments, in English and Italian, on the dative and locative alternations, we find experimental evidence that non-canonical constructions show preference for old-before-new information structure above and beyond canonical constructions, supporting this idea. These findings provide initial empirical evidence for a theory of how information structure may influence the use and emergence of constructions.