The possessive dative construction has been widely adopted as an unaccusativity diagnostic (Borer and Grodzinsky 1986). Gafter (2014) casts doubt on the relevance of unaccusativity to the acceptability of the construction. We ran a series of acceptability judgment experiments to investigate the validity of the possessive dative construction as an unaccusativity diagnostic, controlling for possible confounds such as animacy, definiteness, plausibility, lexical choice, type of possession and context salience. The experiments reveal that possessive datives are significantly more acceptable with unaccusative verbs than with unergatives, including reflexive and emission verbs. We conclude that unaccusatives, but not unergatives, are grammatical in the construction, and defend a structural account of the data.

中文翻译：

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非宾格与所有格与格的相关性

所有格与格结构已被广泛采用作为非宾格诊断（Borer and Grodzinsky 1986）。 Gafter（2014）对非宾格性与结构可接受性的相关性提出了质疑。我们进行了一系列可接受性判断实验，以研究所有格与格结构作为非宾格诊断的有效性，控制可能的混杂因素，例如生命性、明确性、合理性、词汇选择、所有格类型和上下文显着性。实验表明，所有格与非宾格动词比非作格动词（包括反身动词和发射动词）更容易被接受。我们的结论是，非宾格而非非作格在结构上符合语法，并捍卫了数据的结构性解释。