The possessive dative in Serbian as a valency phenomenon: a preliminary empirical study

This paper deals with two factors cross-linguistically known to play a role in the use of the possessive dative constructions: the semantic properties of the verb (patient-affecting vs. non-patient-affecting), and the nature of the possessive relationship (inalienable vs. alienable). Specifically, we look at how these two factors are relevant for Serbian, a language with a relatively free use of the possessive dative. We report an empirical study consisting of an offline Likert scale acceptability judgement task and an online binary acceptability judgement task, whose results indicate that the acceptance rates for the posses- sive dative in Serbian are dependent on both of the studied factors and are best explained through their interaction.