Historical Changes in Basque Dative Alternations: evidence for a derivational analysis
Javier Ormazabal, Juan Romero
October 2017 

North-Eastern Basque in historical times undergo two interrelated changes in the properties of dative constructions: i) the use of the dative expands to include the marking of spatial functions of different sorts, as well as the aspectual status of the event as unbounded; and (ii) dative-agreement with the auxiliary becomes optional, an innovation that comes together with important word order alterations. The properties and internal chronology of these changes are of great theoretical relevance to elucidate issues on the architecture of grammar and the place and form of parametric variation. In this paper we argue that standard non-derivational approaches to dative alternations, which assume that the agreement/agreementless alternation reflects a new situation where an emerging adpositional construction coexists with an independent applicative strategy, fail to account for important generalizations concerning the interaction of the changes. Instead, a derivational approach based on the incorporation of an adpositional head accounts naturally for the distribution of facts and conforms to the properties of dative variation crosslinguistically. Following the same line, we also argue for a revision of the "High/Low Applicatives" distinction that approaches them to the situation of subjects, where elements of a very different origin occupy the same structural position.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/002536 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Glossa 2(1), 78. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.103
keywords:	dative alternations, applicatives, historical change, optional agreement, parameters, spatial preposition, syntax
previous versions:	v3 [March 2017] v2 [March 2016] v1 [June 2015]
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