Dative Ambiguity in Rusian: A Corpus Induced Study

Abstract

Abstract When describing the Russian dative case, an observation often made in passing is that its assignment to certain types of arguments is ambiguous, particularly in constructions with a predicative infinitive. Thus far, no studies have put this problem into focus nor described the range of structures to which it applies. I approach this problem with corpus-driven methods. The present study shows that the predicate order and the referential prominence hierarchy can be used as explanatory variables in the modelling of the semanticsyntactic role assignment.