Two types of variation in the morphosyntactic expression of recipients of dative verbs in Korean

It has been observed that a subset of dative verbs that express caused possession such as cwu- ‘give’, ceykongha-‘offer’ and swuyeha- ‘award’ allow both dative and accusative case on their recipient arguments. These verbs contrast with caused motion verbs such as verbs of sending and throwing, which allow their recipient argument to be realized only with dative case or other oblique postpositions. This paper presents a novel, probabilistic account of the morphosyntactic expression of recipients of Korean dative verbs that can explain two types of variation that remain unexplained by previous approaches to dative verbs: speaker variation and grammatical gradience in the realization of recipients of dative verbs. It is shown that these problems can be accounted for in a unified way in terms of the relative ranking of and the distance between two conflicting constraints in Stochastic Optimality Theory (Boersma and Hayes 2001): a F AITH (R EC ) constraint requiring faithful expression of the recipient role (Bresnan and Nikitina 2009) and a R ECIPIENT / D IRECT C ASE (R EC /D C ) constraint enforcing direct case more strongly on a semantically stronger type of recipients, i.e., a recipient entailed to possess a theme. This result provides new evidence for probabilistic approaches to argument realization where probabilistic constraints that relate an argument’s semantic prominence and a morphosyntactic prominence contrast (direct vs. oblique marking) play a crucial role in argument marking.