3.2.3 Conclusion

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In addition to the conclusions already given after every paragraph, the following overall tendencies could be observed in our study:

  1. In opposition to what we had assumed on the basis of Rohdenburg's article, it was not the group of AE informants but the BE group which gave better ratings to the sentences containing non-reflexively used verbs.
  2. The results vary strikingly between the individual items (cf. results for the non-reflexive use of to qualify and to overwork).
  3. Overall, ALE speakers' judgements tend to be more similar to those of the AE informants (cf. Chart 4).

Nevertheless, the shortcomings of our study, namely the difference in numbers and age of informants as well as the heterogeneity between the three groups, have to be kept in mind when considering these results. It would be worth the while to repeat this study with different age groups of participants and combine these results with a corpus-based study of some individual items to see whether similar tendencies would be observed.






















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