This paper discusses the phenomenon of dative alternation in English, and presents syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic explanations to the choice between dative structure and double object structure. It will be argued that a unified explanation encompassing the discourse variables based on the corpus analysis in Williams (1994) and Bresnan and Nikitina (2008) as well as the syntactic structure suggested in Larson (1988) and the typology of verbs in Krifka (2003) is needed to explain the diversity of the dative alternation.

• 김학연(대구가톨릭대학교)