The author presents the thesis that the referent of the dative noun phrase is ‘a second human participant’ of the event ‒ referent of the proposition in question. The same applies to the referent of the genitive noun phrase. The two constructions differ only in their syntactic distribution ‒ dative is an adverbal case, while genetive is adnominal, which is the result of their semantic roles ‒ ‘recipient’ for dative and ‘possessor’ for genetive.