Dative Ambiguity in Rusian: A Corpus Induced Study

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.