Abstract
This paper looks into the English dative alternation in which the arguments of a verb can be syntactically realized both in the double object form and in the to-PP form. By adopting the insightful argument for the verb dependency(Jackendoff, 1990; Rappaport & Levin, 2008), it proposes a lexical feature-based analysis by which the lexical feature [P(ossession)] and [M(otion)] give rise to the dative alternation. The features are also argued to feed the underlying structure of the arguments of dative verbs. The analysis uniquely analyzes the dative alternation via a post-syntactic operation Morphological Adjunction. It can also account for the mismatch between syntactic forms and distinct meanings. In brief, it can deal with in a more systematic way seemingly unpredictable distributions of the English dative alternation.
Published Version
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