Dative

9 Key excerpts on "Dative"

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  The Semantics of Case

  • Olga Kagan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Dative Case Dative is a cross-linguistically widespread oblique case which is observed in a wide range of constructions and is associated with a set of semantic interpretations. The most prototypical position in which it is checked is that of an indirect object, but the distribution of Dative marking is by no means limited to nominals with this grammatical function. Thus, we find Dative subjects, Dative complements of prepositions and even non- argument Datives. Crucially for our purposes, (a) Dative case- marking is strongly interrelated with the assignment of certain thematic roles and/or with certain features of which theta-roles are composed and (b) the range of meanings with which this case is associated repeats itself in a wide range of languages, includ- ing genetically unrelated ones. The fact that all these meanings are systematically linked to the same case suggests that we are not dealing with a mere coincidence/homonymy; rather, a common semantic core that unifies all the uses becomes at least plausible. Below, I begin by listing the meanings/uses with which the Dative is associated. Given the rich distribution of this case in some languages, the list will not be exhaustive, but I hope to relate to most salient, cross-linguistically observed uses. 2.1 THEMATIC ROLES Dative case is associated with a range of thematic roles, which include mainly the following. (i) Goal The argument denoting an entity to which motion is directed, one that constitutes the endpoint of a path. 39 (1) a. KANNADA (Amritavalli 2004:4) maisuur-ige obbaru hoodaru Mysore -dat a.person went ‘Someone went to Mysore.’ b. HEBREW Dani tas le-London flew flew dat- London ‘Dani went to London by plane.’ c. JAPANESE (Fukuda 2007:166, ex. 2b) Gakusei-ga yane-#o/ni nobor-ta. Student -nom roof -acc/dat climb -perf ‘Students climbed to the roof.’ Not all languages allow Dative marking on inanimate goals, as we will see below.

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  Language in the Context of Use

  Discourse and Cognitive Approaches to Language

  • Andrea Tyler, Yiyoung Kim, Mari Takada, Andrea Tyler, Yiyoung Kim, Mari Takada(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Thus, beyond introduction of formal markers of Dative and a short generic explanation of its most basic usage to designate a recipient of an object in a transfer, it is customary to provide alphabetically arranged lists of verbs or adjectives and their translations, with none or little explanations of the reasons for using Dative with them. 1 These simplistic treatments perpetrate a misconception that German grammatical system (or, for that matter, a system of any foreign language) is an aggregation of oddities or exceptions with no way of gaining insight into correct usage of 146 Olga Liamkina grammatical phenomena beyond memorization. In this paper I will argue that Cognitive Linguistics provides a particularly advantageous framework for developing instructional explanations that counterbalance this perception and help learners discover a complex and coherent nature of the Dative case. 2. Semantic structure of the German Dative and L2 learning challenges One of the fundamental premises of Cognitive Linguists is the assumption that grammatical categories are not arbitrary but motivated by meaning. Langacker (1987) claimed that grammatical categories are themselves symbolic in nature and that grammatical constructions structure and construe situations in a particular way for linguistic purposes. More specifically, recent contributions in this line of inquiry have challenged the assumption, prevalent in the traditional formalist linguistic paradigms, that morphological cases are mere grammatical markers without inner semantic content; instead cases are seen as one of the primary tools for construal of non-linguistic material in a way that varies from language to language (Janda 1988; Nikiforidou 1991; Serra-Borneto 1997; Zubin 1977, 1979).

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  A Cognitive Linguistic Study

  • John Newman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The Dative in other Indo-European languages may be described along similar lines, with the RECIPIENT sense relatively prominent. As in Russian, so also in German, other uses of the Dative present them-selves which might be relatable in varying degrees to the role of the RECIPIENT in a GIVE scene. The act of giving and speaking can be thought of as happening within the sphere of interest of the recipi-ent/addressee, leading to the additional use in German in which the da-tive marks the person in whose sphere of interest an event takes place. This is the Dative of interest, as in German Fahr mir nicht zu schnell! 'Don't drive too fast' where the Dative mir adds a sense of concern or involvement on the part of the speaker. This is just one of many typical extensions of the Dative case in Indo-European languages. Wierzbicka (1988: 391—433) and Rudzka-Ostyn (to appear, a) provide insightful ac-counts of the many uses of the Dative in one such language, Polish. The various uses of the Polish Dative constitute an extremely large network Beyond the object 85 Schematic meaning of Dative (?) Schematic meaning refers to person who is adversely affected by action Schematic RECIPIENT Betrayed person meaning ο betray someone t Figurative type of RECIPIENT ο help someone Literal type of RECIPIENT to give someone something Figure 14. Russian Dative case of related meanings, including meanings which appear, at first, quite far removed from the RECIPIENT meaning. Rudzka-Ostyn's account also includes a fairly comprehensive schematic network for the Polish Dative which gives some indication of the complexity of the Dative category in Polish. Smith (1987, 1993) also considers a number of extensions of the German Dative case, as part of a Cognitive Grammar account of both accusative and Dative cases in German.

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  American Indian and Indoeuropean Studies

  Papers in Honor of Madison S. Beeler

  • Kathryn Klar, Margaret Langdon, Shirley Silver, Kathryn Klar, Margaret Langdon, Shirley Silver(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The German sentences provided to illustrate Dative of reference could be counted ethical Datives in appropriate contexts, and the Modern Greek Dative of interest as in μού σκοτώσανε τό παίδι μου 'they killed my child' must certainly be counted as an ethical Dative if emotional involve-ment is the defining criterion for the latter. What the Dative case signals in all these instances is direction toward a person, either literally or metaphorically. In other words, the Dative can mean direction toward in an inner sense, direction toward cognitive or emotional states. Structurally, the Datives shown in the preceding examples are sentential modifiers rather than verbal adjuncts 2 . Their presence is not required by any particular constituent, although their meanings, their emotional colorations, come largely from presuppositions and meanings associated with their atten-dant verbs, and from extra-linguistic or cultural expectations about how the actions described in these verbs are relevant for human beings; i.e., there seems to be neither structural nor functional justification for distinguishing three varieties of sentential Dative. One kind of sentential Dative exists, although its exact interpretation depends heavily on both linguistic and extra-linguistic context. The sentential Dative establishes a personalized, pseudo-possessive relation-ship between the agent of the action described and the Dative patient, or between the Dative patient and the direct goal of the action, depending on the situation described. The many and various ways that Dative case interacts with Indo-European possessive morphology and semantics cannot be discussed 386 Martha Β. Kendall in any great detail here; however, a few examples are provided to show that it is indeed an interesting topic.

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  Dative constructions in Romance and beyond

  • Jaume Mateu, Anna Pineda(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  We are thus dealing with a case of mesoparametric variation, in that in these varieties accusative, arguably the core object Case crosslinguistically and licensed by v , hence situated at the top of our hierarchy, indiscriminately marks all DP objects, a naturally defnable class (namely, [-NOM] Ds). The next option is that exhibited by varieties such as ancient Greek and Salentino which, by con-trast, unambiguously distinguish indirect objects by marking them Dative (10b; cf. also (3) above), in contrast to varieties such as standard modern Greek, southern Greek dialects and Italo-Greek which are situated further down the hierarchy in that they confate this category with the genitive (10c). The greater and increas-ing markedness of these latter two options follows from the observation that crosslinguistically Dative, generally taken to be licensed by an Appl(icative) func-tional head (see, for example, Cuervo 2020 [this volume]; for an opposing view, 325 Adam Ledgeway, Norma Schifano & Giuseppina Silvestri see however Manzini 2020 [this volume]), represents the least marked distinc-tive Case for indirect objects, whereas genitive, at least in those languages with rich case systems, typically displays all the hallmarks of an inherent Case whose distribution is largely defned by not entirely predictable lexical factors, hence taken here to be assigned by a lexical V head. These two options refect, respec-tively, micro-and nanoparametric variation. In the former case Dative serves to uniquely mark a small, lexically defnable subclass o f functional heads, namely all Ds bearing the RECIPIENT feature (for arguments in favour of treating theta roles as formal features, see Hornstein 1999). In the latter case, by contrast, genitive is associated with a class of predicates whose membership can only be established on purely lexical grounds, inasmuch as the RECIPIENT feature is just one of many semantic roles associated with genitive marking.

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  The Grammar of Inalienability

  A Typological Perspective on Body Part Terms and the Part-Whole Relation

  • Hilary Chappell, William McGregor, Hilary Chappell, William McGregor(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Syntactically, the Dative of the possessor marks the animate possessor of a body part or other object (Heidolph et al 1980: 368); the possessed item may be the subject or direct object of a clause, or part of an adverbial phrase (this means that practically only a possessed item in the genitive or as another Dative noun phrase is excluded). 2.5. Investigation procedure The distribution of this possessive Dative - one of the few instances where two cases can alternate, as in (5a) and (5c) above - has always invited the comparison with the genitive (for example, von Weiss 1962), so that the, or a, meaning of the Dative is derived from the perceived semantic difference between the two cases. The underlying assumption is that both cases indicate a having-relation (Brinkmann 1962: 403 - 404), although in different ways. The approach chosen here is different, starting not from the syntactic environment of the Dative/genitive alternation alone, but by investigating body part nouns systematically in the semantic roles of moving object, 7 5 0 Dorothea Neumann patient (object caused to move or caused to undergo a change) and loca-tion, and examining how the part-whole relation is coded syntactically within these roles. The aim is to explain the distribution of the posses-sive Dative not only by comparison with the possessive genitive, but by determining its place in the grammar of body parts in general. Throughout the discussion a semantic metalanguage similar to that de-veloped by Anna Wierzbicka from Semantic primitives (1972) onwards is used in preference to a more abstract terminology to explain the cen-tral ideas, but no attempt has been made to translate all the meanings discussed into this language. The main difference between the semantic analysis offered here and that of Anna Wierzbicka's lies in the differen-tiation between explicit and inferred meanings. 3. Inferences The idea of inference is an important concept used in this paper.

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  Russian and Slavic Grammar

  Studies 1931-1981

  • Roman Jakobson, Linda R. Waugh, Morris Malle, Linda R. Waugh, Morris Malle(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Skalicka writes in his book (which contains much of interest for general grammar): one cannot assume a fundamental difference, for example, between the relationships of verb to noun in cases like Czech uciti se necemu 'to learn something' and studovati ηέοο to study something'. Here we sense a certain meaninglessness of the Dative and accusative. And when one interchangeably uses uciti se necemu or uciti se neco, the difference is perhaps felt only as a stylistic one: the construction with the Dative is more pedantic, 'better', than that with the accusative. A certain meaninglessness of the Dative or accusative is clear in this case (21). Such an obliteration of meanings is characteristic of Czech, with its nearly eroded system of case oppositions; but in Russian, with its more stable case system, the corresponding pair ucit'sja 'to learn' with D and ucit' to learn' with A is clearly differentiated as to meaning. One can say ja ucus' francuzskomu jazyku [D] Ί am learning the French language', since the French language exists independently of my learning it, but it is impossi-ble to say ja ucus' svoemu uroku [D]; one can say only ja ucu svoj urok [A] Ί am learning my lesson', since my lesson has no existence without relation to my learning it. Also in such a prepositional D as eto vedet ego kgibeli [D] this is leading him to ruin' instead of vyzyvaet ego gibel' [A] 'brings about his ruin', the Dative object is felt as an easy metaphor, similar to the same word in ego zdet gibel' 'ruin awaits him': the ruin is portrayed here as some-thing certain, previously known and ideally existent. Usually a given verb itself determines whether its object is to be taken as semantically direct or indirect, and if there are two objects, the verb usually determines which is to have a peripheral status and which is to be taken as directly affected by the action.

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  Working with German Corpora

  with a foreword by John Sinclair

  • Bill Dodd(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  These reference tools are very useful, however, in providing numerous examples. Dur-rell is especially helpful in listing virtually every conceivable preposi-tional object construction containing the accusative/Dative prepositions. Folsom (1981, 1984) was one of the first to report on the complexity of German accusative/Dative verbs. Based on six published frequency lists of German vocabulary as well as the LIMAS Corpus (of written German) he concluded, among other things, that the Dative occurs far more frequently than the accusative, that the relative frequency of the nine prepositions is reasonably stable across the various sources (rang-ing from 0. 53% for hinter to 51. 14% for in), and that based on use the nine prepositions can be grouped into five categories: 1 intralocal/translocal (Er liegt im Bett, Sie geht ins Haus); 2 temporal (Sie spielen am Freitag); 3 prepositional object (Er denkt an das neue Auto); 4 adnominal (das Buch aufdem Tisch); and 5 adverbial (Sie spielt in der Re gel gut). He also lists the most common verbs that co-occur with these preposi-tions in either the accusative or Dative case. This paper reports on a recent study of German accusative/Dative prepositions based on the Brigham Young University Corpus of Spoken German (BYU-CSG). The corpus is a collection of 400 informal and spontaneous interviews with native speakers of German from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The interviewees represent a broad spectrum of German speakers with regard to age, gender, geography, and educa-tional background. The interviews are approximately twelve minutes each in length and cover a variety of topics, from current events to recollections of the past. They were recorded in sixty different localities between the years 1989 and 1993. The interviews have been transcribed 118 German accusative/Dative prepositions and the data is accessible through text retrieval programs such as Word-Cruncher and Folio Views (Jones 1997).

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  Social Variation and the Latin Language

  • J. N. Adams(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  These nor- mally precede the verb, except when that is imperative, and in this too there is a similarity to Romance. Nominal indirect objects on the other hand depend on prepositions (derived from , which combined with the Oblique cases and prepositional expressions 287 definite article, e.g.  <  : see Holton et al. 1997: 401). It is not unlikely that Greek and Latin were showing similar features during the period when the Greek and Latin versions of the Actus were written (see below, xxxiii.7), and if that were so a Latin translator might have had no qualms about following the Greek original since Latin had much the same distinctions in the ways in which the indirect-object relation was conveyed. But there is a lack of clarity about the chronology of the loss of Dative forms in Greek, and a lack of detailed accounts of the use of inflected indirect- object forms versus prepositional syntagms in Greek texts and papyri from later antiquity. 12 5.4 Medieval Latin In some medieval texts there is evidence for the encroachment of the preposition on the Dative of the indirect object that goes beyond the types seen so far, though even in some very late texts the restrictions seen above seem to persist. In the Chronicon Salernitanum, for example, the ‘Dative as an indirect object is very seldom replaced by ad ’ (Westerbergh 1956: 243). But ad does occur sometimes with verba dicendi: e.g. pp. 21.2 inquid ad suos (same phrase 21.11, 84.17), 55.13 inquid ad uirum, 96.17 ad Guaiferium protinus Lando ait, 121.23 asserens ad suos quia, 169.18 clam ad unum ex circumstantibus est locutus. The last example is significant, because it does not refer to the address of a crowd and looks like a straightforward indirect- object equivalent (note clam, which rules out projection of the voice).

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