The Dative

This book is the second part of a two-volume reader on the ‘Dative’. In the first part, which appeared in 1996, eleven papers were presented providing a syntactic and semantic description of the category ‘Dative’ in eleven languages. The aim of this second part is to discuss several aspects of the Dative in greater detail. It contains eight papers dealing with theoretical considerations on ‘dativity’ as well as with contrastive, typological and diachronic issues. A major concern is the relation between form (case, grammatical relation) and meaning (semantic roles or other kinds of meaning). Most contributions in this volume represent cognitive and functional views or a critical discussion of them. As in the first volume, the linguistic material mainly stems from Germanic and Romance languages. Contemporary English is the basis for Davidse’s theoretical claims; Pasicki studies the dative in Old English. Dutch appears especially in Geeraerts’ semantic analysis, but also in the papers by Draye, Lamiroy & Delbecque and Van Langendonck. Draye, Lamiroy & Delbecque and Melis also take German into consideration. Latin is dealt with by Melis and Van Langendonck. Modern Romance languages, especially French, provide further data for Melis and Lamiroy & Delbecque. Finally, Newman adduces a variety of languages for his typological analyses.

Since antiquity, scholars have been fascinated by the phenomena of case. The explanation for this fascination is, as Hjelmslev already pointed out over fifty years ago, the fact that he who can unravel the meaning of case-relations, has the key to language structure as a whole. For over three years, a team of twenty scholars affiliated with the Linguistics Department of Leuven University in Belgium has concentrated on case phenomena in different languages, both Indo- and non-Indo-European. It is the first time that such a large scale investigation into case has been undertaken. Noteworthy is also its reliance on computer-stored corpora of authentic material. The results are published as a series (Case and Grammatical Relations across Languages) of which the first volume, a bibliography, appeared in 1994. The first volume on the dative case contains 13 articles, each of which gives a detailed syntactic-semantic description of the dative or its counterparts in a particular language. In addition to the lexico-syntactic frames in which they occur, a number of textual and extra-linguistic factors are taken into account. Languages investigated are English (K. Davidse), German (L. Draye), Dutch (W. Van Belle & W. Van Langendonck), Afrikaans (L.G. de Stadler), Latin (W. Van Hoecke), French (L. Melis), Spanish (N. Delbecque & B. Lamiroy), Portuguese (R. de Andrade), Polish (B. Rudzka-Ostyn), Hungarian (G. Tóth), Pashto (W. Skalmowski), Hebrew (P. Swiggers) and Orizaba Nahuatl (D. Tuggy).

This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English and their diachronic development. Modern English is unusual among European languages in not having a productive dative external possessor construction, whereby the possessor is in the dative case and behaves like an element of the sentence rather than part of the possessive phrase. This type of construction was found in Old English, however, especially in expressions of inalienable possession; it appeared in variation with the internal possessors in the genitive case, which then became the only productive possibility in Middle English. In this book, Cynthia Allen traces the use of dative external possessors in the texts of the Old and early Middle English periods and explores how the empirical data fit with the hypotheses put forward to date. She draws on recent developments in linguistic theory to evaluate both language-internal explanations for the loss of the dative construction and the possible role of language contact, especially with the Brythonic Celtic languages. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of historical syntax and morphology, language variation and change, and the comparative syntax of the Germanic languages.

This book offers a comprehensive account of dative structures across languages –with an important, though not exclusive, focus on the Romance family. As is well-known, datives play a central role in a variety of structures, ranging from ditransitive constructions to cliticization of indirect objects and differentially marked direct objects, and including also psychological predicates, possessor or causative constructions, among many others. As interest in all these topics has increased significantly over the past three decades, this volume provides an overdue update on the state of the art. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume account for both widely discussed patterns of dative constructions as well as those that are relatively unknown.

Where is the locus of language variation? In the grammar, outside the grammar or somewhere in between? Taking up the debate between system- and usage-based approaches, this volume provides new discussions of fundamental issues of language variation. It includes several highly insightful theoretical contributions as well as innovative empirical studies considering different types of data, the role of priming in language change and rare phenomena.