http://dx.doi.org/10.14342/smog.2018.97.55 55 Conative Alternation in English: An Entailment-Based Perspective with Corpus Data Jungsoo Kim (Kyung Hee University) Jungsoo Kim. 2018. Conative Alternation in English: An Entailment-Based Perspective with Corpus Data. Studies in Modern Grammar 97, 55-88. Previous studies on the English conative alternation have resorted to semantic constraints like “attempt”, “motion”, and “contact” on verbs and have taken Levin’s (1993: 41-42) verb classification about the alternation for granted. This study, based on authentic corpus data extracted from BYU-BNC, shows that simple semantic-constraint-based approaches are insufficient and Levin’s (1993) classification is problematic. In particular, this study shows that the verb classes that participate in the conative alternation in English can be classified in terms of entailments about change, motion, and contact and that some classes and subclasses exhibit idiosyncratic properties which cannot be captured by the previous approaches and Levin’s (1993) classification. [Key words: English conative alternation, entailment, change, motion, contact, corpus data] 1. Introduction This paper investigates the so-called conative alternation in English, some basic examples of which are illustrated in (1): (1) a. John kicked (at) the ball. b. John cut (at) the meat. As can be seen here, the most salient syntactic property of the English conative alternation is that it allows a canonically transitive verb subcate- gorizing for an NP direct object (DO) to alternate with an intransitive verb