Robert Sviben


2025

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Dative alternations in less-researched syntactic patterns of standard Croatian
Matea Andrea Birtić | Siniša Runjaić | Robert Sviben
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)

Dative alternation in double object constructions is a frequently researched syntactic phenomenon, having been investigated across world languages. Consequently, even relatively smaller and under-resourced languages like Croatian have seen influential studies on the topic. Recent syntactic and semantic analyses of verbs in standard Croatian have identified less-explored instances of dative alternation. This contribution aims to describe the alternation between dative case and prepositional phrase for the non-agentive and intransitive uses of the verb služiti (‘to serve’), as well as the dative alternation for the agentive and transitive uses of the verb izbjeći (‘to avoid’).