We investigate the factors that influence argument order variations in Dutch, focusing on ditransitive verbs. Evidence from grammaticality judgments is complemented with evidence from the distributions of the alternants in corpora of spoken and written Dutch. We find that while the NP/PP alternation is influenced by weight, the direct object shift (DOS) in the dative alternation is bound to certain types of pronouns. Additional evidence for our account for the DOS is found in the Dutch AcI construction. Our findings are modeled within the framework of Optimality Theoretic syntax, allowing for violable and ranked constraints, as well as a stochastic interpretation of the analysis. 1
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