The English dative alternation

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Most speakers of English are unconsciously proficient in combining all kinds of information in order to form the grammatical structure they use for language production.

In this essay I attempt to describe one of these complex structures linguistically, namely the nature of dative verbs. Understanding the syntactic patterns of the verb is a challenging task ¿ not only for the acquisition of English as a second language, but for linguistic research just as much.

We're occupied with transitive verbs that take more than one internal argument.There is a great number of alternations in English grammar which do not involve a change in the transitivity of the verb (Levin 1993), one of them being the Dative Alternation, which will be the topic of this essay.

I will begin by introducing some general findings of research in this field whereupon a list of verbs will follow which presents groups of verbs that do or do not perform the alternation.

At the core of my dissertation I will compare two different approaches on the subject, namely the works of Manfred Krifka and Rappaport Hovav & Levin. They represent two sites of the debate concerning the semantics of the dative alternation. Whilst the former defends the so-called polysemy view, the latter are enthusiastic for the single meaning approach. I will go into more detail in section 4.

In the final analysis I'm going to introduce a brief study of the dative alternation in different variants of English, namely British, Australian and American English.