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’).

The distinction between arguments and adjuncts is a relevant topic in many linguistic theories (Tesniere, 1959; Chomsky, 1981; Langacker, 1987; Van Valin, 2001; Herbst, 2014, etc.). Even though theories provide similar definitions of arguments and adjuncts, sometimes it is difficult to draw a clear line between them. In order to determine ambiguous syntactic parts as arguments or adjuncts, various tests have been proposed, but they often give contradictory results and are not fully reliable. Nevertheless, they can be used as an auxiliary tool. The project Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Arguments and Adjuncts in Croatian – SARGADA was launched with the aim of thoroughly investigating the distinction between arguments and adjuncts in Croatian, and to apply the theoretical results in a syntactic repository which would be a valuable resource for improving NLP tools and for researching and teaching Croatian. In this paper, we will present diagnostic tests chosen as a tool to distinguish between arguments and adjuncts in the Croatian language. The repository containing sentences with ambiguous syntactic phrases and our workflow will also be described.