peer reviewed ; Psych verbs, i.e. verbs expressing some mental state or event, are known for their wide range of syntactic variation in and between languages (Croft 1993; Kitis 2009; Verhoeven 2010), and Dutch is no exception. Particularly interesting about the Dutch psych verbs is that two argument realizations may be possible for a single verb. Below, the verb ergeren (‘to annoy’) is shown to realize its experiencer, i.e. the participant that experiences the mental state, in both object (1) and subject (2) position. (1) Transitive argument construction: Maar iets ergert medefirmant Melkert (ConDiv corpus) But something annoys business_partner Melkert ‘But something annoys business partner Melkert.’ (2) Reflexive argument construction: Hij ergert zich aan de besluiteloosheid van het kabinet (ConDiv corpus) He annoys himself to the indecisiveness of the cabinet ‘The indecisiveness of the cabinet annoys him.’ Drawing from data of the ConDiv corpus of written Dutch (Grondelaers et al. 2000) and the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (Oostdijk et al. 2002), we have investigated the factors driving this alternation for the verbs ergeren (‘to annoy’), interesseren (‘to interest’), storen (‘to disturb’) and verbazen (‘to amaze’). The statistical work horse technique was logistic regression. Many theoretical frameworks deal with the argument variation of psych verbs through some form of the agentivity hypothesis, which by and large claims that more agentive participants are more likely to take up subject position (Hopper and Thompson 1980; Grimshaw 1990; Dowty 1991; Langacker 1991; Croft 1993; Pesetsky 1995; Vanhoe 2002). However, we will claim that it is important to distinguish between the type and token level agentivity hypotheses, which are often conflated, yet have fundamentally different theoretical implications (Dowty 1991: 579–581; Goldberg 1995: 220–221; Levin and Grafmiller 2012: 220–221). The type level compares the preference for argument constructions between verbs (Van de Velde 2004). Among the verbs under scrutiny, ...