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Goal and DOM datives

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Abstract

In a range of Indo-European languages (Romance, Albanian, Iranian, Indo-Aryan), the same oblique case (‘dative’) is associated with indirect objects and with animate/definite direct objects, independently of the particular morphology employed to spell out the oblique (inflectional or pre/postpositional). We argue that there is a syntactic category dative coinciding with the morphological one and encompassing both goal dative and definiteness/animacy dative. We provide a characterization of goal dative as an elementary predicate introducing a part-whole (i.e. possession) relation, arguing that the definiteness/animacy dative is an instance of this elementary predicate. Evidence sometimes used against the unification proposed (e.g. passives, agreement) admits of, or requires, other explanations.

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Notes

  1. Other formal morphology frameworks adopting Late Insertion aim to correct some of these problems, for instance nanosyntax has no underspecification (hence Impoverishment). However, it has other problems—for instance an exponent in DM resembles a conventional lexical item (up to underspecification), with a non-contradictory content; an exponent in nanosyntax is a set of all of the specifications it can in principle fill, including potentially contradictory ones. In other words, nanosyntax is much less restrictive than DM in this respect. As far as we can tell, nanosyntactic treatments of case (Caha 2009) go no further than the empirical results of DM.

    In present terms, the lexicon is the locus of externalization in the sense of Berwick and Chomsky (2011) pairing syntactico-semantic content with phonological content. As in Chomsky (1995), furthermore, syntax does not exist but as the product of the merger of lexical items. In what follows we shall often use the expression ‘x lexicalizes y’. In the absence of Late Insertion, ‘x lexicalizes y’ cannot, of course, mean that the phonological string x lexicalizes the syntactic node y, which is what is more usually rendered in DM as ‘x is an exponent for y’. What we mean is that lexical item x lexicalizes concept y, by pairing y with a phonological form z.

  2. In fact, exactly as we claim that goal and DOM datives correspond to the same syntactic category, so it is tempting to see a potential unification between experiencer ‘subject’ datives and the dative/oblique external arguments found in ergativity splits. See also Sect. 3 below for the relevance of the notion of ‘possession’ to goal datives and DOM—the historical and typological literature on Iranian languages (e.g. Montaut 2004) insists on the relevance of the same notion for the assignment of oblique to perfective (‘ergative’) subjects (cf. Manzini et al. 2015).

  3. Other often quoted work on case, for instance Pesetsky and Torrego (2001, 2004) is conceptually close to Chomsky’s (2001, 2008); case is a form of agreement (T agreement for them, where T must be abstract enough to encompass nominative, accusative and oblique). See Sect. 3 for more on the ‘tense/aspect’ generative literature on case, specifically Svenonius (2002).

  4. However in Kashmiri, DOM is found only in progressive tenses. For instance, in the perfect in (i), where the external argument takes the ergative form tsye, the 1st person internal argument takes the bi non-oblique form.

    1. (i)
      figure g

  5. Note that syntactic haplology provides a possible treatment for the incompatibility of ergative case and DOM case in Kashmiri (fn. 4). If in Kashmiri, there is a single oblique per \(v\mathrm{P}\), this determines the impossibility of DOM datives in ergative environments like (i) of fn. 4.

  6. It is worth noting that in some Indo-Aryan languages, the same morphology -ne lexicalizes both the external argument in ergativity splits and the DOM internal argument, leading to double oblique patterns similar to Vafsi (9). An example in point is Bangru (Stroński 2009:246)/Haryanvi (Butt 2007:18), as in (i)–(ii).

    1. (i)
      figure j
    1. (ii)
      figure k

    Vice versa, Iranian languages with three cases are also known. In Yazgulyam, a South-Eastern Iranian language, subjects of intransitive clauses (iii), and subjects and direct objects of transitive clauses (iv) in the perfect receive three morphologically distinct cases in 1st/2nd person, namely absolutive, oblique and accusative respectively.

    1. (iii)
      figure l
    1. (iv)
      figure m

  7. The dative-genitive syncretism characterizes also Iranian languages, Albanian, Greek, as well as Middle Indo-Aryan (cf. Breunis 1990). In Iranian and in Albanian (as well as in Romanian, though not in the particular example we have chosen in (20b)), genitive embedding requires a pre-genitival introducer, namely the ezafe of Iranian varieties, the article of Albanian or Greek etc. (Larson and Yamakido 2008 on Persian; Manzini and Savoia 2011a, 2011b on Albanian; Franco et al. 2015 on the comparison of Iranian and Albanian).

  8. Note that (26a)–(27a) do not violate principle C. The issue of the exact definition of binding principle is orthogonal to those discussed here.

  9. We inserted this discussion at the prompting of an anonymous reviewer. We will return to (⊇) in Sect. 3.2.1.

    A further twist is introduced by the Appl literature, since Cuervo (2003) for Spanish and Diaconescu and Rivero (2007) for Romanian argue that these Romance languages have a Dative Shift alternation. According to this literature the pattern in Italian (26) is observed in the absence of clitic doubling in Spanish and Romanian—while in the presence of clitic doubling pattern, (27) is observed. The overall conclusion is that the dative clitic is the head of an ApplP taking the theme as its object and the Possessor as its Spec and yielding a Dative Shift configuration; in its absence a non-Dative Shifted configuration is obtained (DP-to-DP). On the Appl idea applied to Romance, see fn. 11.

  10. Again the discussion of English was prompted by an anonymous reviewer. Actually the quantifier binding facts reported even by Larson (1988:338), are not completely clear-cut, cf. (i), leaving some room to believe that English to and Romance \(a\) may have the same status after all.

    (i)  ?I gave/sent his paycheck to every worker

  11. In the Appl literature, a dative that takes an event as its argument is a ‘high’ Appl. We refer the reader to Boneh and Nash (2012) for a review of problems arising in classifying Romance datives according to the categories ‘low’ and ‘high’ Appl. We will return to a core instance of ‘high’ Appl, i.e. experiencer datives, in Sect. 4.3.

  12. It is addressed at the prompting of an anonymous reviewer.

  13. Baker and Vinokurova (2010) provide an account for the optionality in Sakha (39), which is however at odds with the absence of semantic contrasts in Italian (40).

  14. Torrego (1998) includes the agentivity of the subject, the telicity of the predicate and the affectedness of the object among the necessary by-products of what she calls the marked accusative. According to Torrego, all of these, as well as the animacy/definiteness of the marked accusative, depend on movement of the internal argument to [Spec, \(v\)]. However the various properties are asserted of the [Spec, \(v\)] position, rather than truly explained by it. Furthermore, the data of von Heusinger and Kaiser (2011) undermine the idea that agentivity (causer) or affectedness (change-of-state) are necessary to determine DOM.

  15. It is also tempting to extend the same treatment to the other main type of oblique case, namely genitive. In (i) ‘the students’ introduced by the preposition di ‘of’ is an experiencer, i.e. it is construed as a possessor of the mental state of ‘fear’. However in (ii) ‘the professor’, also introduced by ‘of’, far from being a possessor of the same mental state, is its subject matter—hence in present terms ‘the professor is (part of) the fear’ of the students. The experiencer and the subject matter can also combine, as in (iii). The contrast between (i) and (ii) is reminiscent of the literature on Romance di or English of as a copula admitting both of direct and inverse construal (Hoekstra and Mulder 1990; den Dikken 1995)—though at the moment we are unable to evaluate the relation between the two proposals.

    (i)

    la paura degli studenti quando sono interrogati

     

    the fear of the students when they.are questioned

    (ii)

    la paura del professore quando interroga

     

    the fear of the professor when he.questions

    (iii)

    la paura del professore degli studenti

     

    the fear of the professor of the students

  16. We are discussing this at the suggestion of an anonymous reviewer.

  17. As an anonymous reviewer points out, we predict that animate definite DPs (and even more so pronouns) will nevertheless be associated with DOM. As far as we can tell this is true, as in Spanish (i).

    1. (i)
      figure ak

  18. We leave it completely open here whether accounting for the relevant cuts requires OT devices like harmonic alignments (Aissen 2003). We note that such devices do not sit well with minimalist theories.

  19. Manzini and Savoia (2011a, 2011b) treat in this way the syncretism of oblique and locative (‘ablative’) case in Albanian.

  20. This treatment of experiencers as possessors of mental states/events is essentially the same as Landau’s (2010), for whom experiencers are locations of mental events. We already commented in Sect. 3.2 on the relation between the present notion of inclusion/part-whole and the notion of location—with which much literature identifies possession.

  21. As briefly discussed for Vafsi in (9)–(10), a Tense/Aspect triggered ergativity split, leading to the oblique realization of the external argument, also characterizes selected Iranian languages. In some of these languages, an internal argument bearing DOM dative/oblique case agrees with the perfect participle, for instance in Baluchi (i). In other languages, it does not. For instance Mâsâli is reported to use a fossilised 3sg agreement morpheme in the perfect, where the internal argument is a DOM oblique, as in (ii).

    1. (i)
      figure av
    1. (ii)
      figure aw

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers and our editor, Ad Neeleman, for their help in shaping this work. Many of the ideas in this article originate from our collaboration with Leonardo Savoia, who we think of as our third coauthor; all mistakes are of course ours. Rita Manzini’s research was partially supported through a PRIN 2012 grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR), Research title: Theory, Experimentation, Applications: Long distance dependencies. Ludovico Franco was supported by a PRIN 2010/11 grant to Dr. Benedetta Baldi at the University of Florence, and by a Portuguese FCT grant (IF/00846/2013). The work was conceived jointly; for Italian administrative purposes Ludovico Franco takes responsibility for Sects. 1 (excluding 1.1), 2.1, 4.2, 4.4 (excluding 4.4.1).

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  1. Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Studi Interculturali, Università di Firenze, Via S. Reparata 93, 50100, Firenze, Italy

    M. Rita Manzini

  2. CLUNL/FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Av. de Berna 26-C, Lisboa, Portugal

    Ludovico Franco

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  1. M. Rita Manzini
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Manzini, M.R., Franco, L. Goal and DOM datives. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 197–240 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9303-y

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