Previous studies on the English conative alternation have resorted to semantic constraints like “attempt”, “motion”, and “contact” on verbs and have taken Levin’s (1993: 41-42) verb classification about the alternation for granted. This study, based on authentic corpus data extracted from BYU-BNC, shows that simple semantic-constraint-based approaches are insufficient and Levin’s (1993) classification is problematic. In particular, this study shows that the verb classes that participate in the conative alternation in English can be classified in terms of entailments about change, motion, and contact and that some classes and subclasses exhibit idiosyncratic properties which cannot be captured by the previous approaches and Levin’s (1993) classification.

1. Introduction
 2. Previous Approaches to the Conative Alternation
 3. Verb Classes of the Conative Alternation in Englishand Their Grammatical Properties
  3.1. Entailment about Change in Both the Transitive and ConativeAlternants
  3.2. Entailment about Change in the Transitive Alternant, but Not in theConative Alternant
  3.3. No Entailment about Change in Both the Transitive and ConativeAlternants
   3.3.1. Subclass 1: Entailment about Motion in Both the Alternants, butEntailment about Contact Only in the Transitive Alternant
   3.3.2. Subclass 2: No Entailment about Motion in Both the Alternantsbut Entailment about Contact in Both the Alternants
   3.3.3. Subclass 3: No Entailment about Motion in Both the Alternantsand Entailment about Contact Only in the Transitive Alternant
   3.3.4. Subclass 4: Entailment about Motion and Contact in Both theAlternants
   3.3.5. Subclass 5: No entailment about motion and contact in either ofthe alternant
 4. Conclusion
 References

• Jungsoo Kim(Kyung Hee University)