Tijelo i njegovi dijelovi između dativa i akuzativa
The body and its parts between the dative and the accusative

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines events in which the basic semantic roles are assigned to persons and parts of their bodies. In principle, there are two main types of these events that can be referred to as (1) situations with patients of physical actions, and (2) situations with experiencers of psychophysical states. These two types can be linguistically coded by two different syntactic constructions: (1) constructions in which a person is marked by non-prepositional dative, and (2) constructions in which a person is marked by non-prepositional accusative. The difference between the two constructions is based on the selection of direct and indirect participants in a given event, i.e. on a relative importance that is ascribed to one or another participant, respectively, nature of the action denoted by the verb and the body part that is included. In some situations, the dative construction is the only option, while in others it is the accusative construction. Whenever there is a possibility of concurrence of the two constructions, the ‘free choice’ depends on a specific meaning the speaker wants to convey.

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