TY  - BOOK
AU  - Marie-Louise  Häfner
PY  - 2014
CY  - München, Germany
PB  - GRIN Verlag
SN  - 9783656634584
TI  - The English dative alternation
UR  - https://www.hausarbeiten.de/document/272007
N2  - 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.  
KW  - english, dative alternation, linguistics, linguistic, argument structure, english argument structure
LA  - English
ER  -