Two modes of dative and genitive case assignment: Evidence from two stages of Greek

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the properties of dative and genitive objects in Classical vs. Modern Greek. Based on the difference in behavior of dative/genitive objects of ditransitives and monadic transitives in the two periods of Greek which correlates with a range of systematic alternations in the case realization of Modern Greek IO arguments depending on the presence and category (DP vs. PP) of lower theme arguments, we argue that there are two distinct modes of dative and genitive objective case assignment: they are either prepositional or dependent (structural) cases, as also proposed by Baker and Vinokurova (2010), and Baker (2015) on the basis of cross-linguistic evidence. If we adopt this proposal a number of important implications follow both for the syntax of Modern Greek genitive indirect objects and for the understanding of the change from Classical to Standard Modern Greek which must be seen as a development from a grammatical system where dative and genitive were lexical/inherent/prepositional cases to a system where genitive is a dependent case assigned to DPs in the sense of Marantz (1991). Interestingly, the development from Classical Greek (CG) to Modern Greek (MG) affected the availability of dative/genitive-nominative alternations in passivization, in the opposite direction of what might be expected, i.e. such alternations were possible in CG and are no longer possible in MG. Our paper addresses this puzzle and argues that the availability of such alternations is not always a diagnostic tool for detecting whether an indirect object DP bears lexically specified or structural/dependent Case, contra standard practice in the literature.

Генитив У Настави Савременог Грчког Језика Као Страног

“…Наши резултати су показали да на избор падежа за исказивање индиректног објекта не утиче природа глагола, тј. чињеница да ли је глагол монотранзитиван или дитранзитиван, као код изворних говорника, у складу са подацима које износе Мертирис и Анагностопулу и Севдали (Mertyris 2014: 1101, Anagnostopoulou & Sevdali 2020, пре свега јер се већина испитаника с овим језиком срела први пут тек на студијама, те, самим тим није имала прилике да наведене конструкције усвоји.…”

Romance pronominal clitics as pure heads

“… [9] Instrumentals and datives are ordinarily described as applicatives, but this is not so for genitives. For Greek, Anagnostopoulou & Sevdali (2020) list Gen as an exponent of Appl, including its locative (source) meaning. …”

High and Low Arguments in Northern and Pontic Greek

“…The next two classes represent two types of motion verbs: ones where the SMG genitive would be a goal, e.g., SMG mu írθe to Gráma "the letter came to me", and ones where it is a source, e.g., SMG mu kséfiJe "he/she/it got away from me". Finally, we have two classes of unselected "high" arguments: external possessors (alienable or inalienable; see (Anagnostopoulou and Sevdali 2020) for extensive argumentation that Greek does not have possessor raising), e.g., SMG mu ponái to cefáli "my head hurts", and ethical datives with a diverse range of verbs, e.g., SMG píJe ce mu pandréftice "s/he went and got married (and it affects me)".…”

“…We are using the terms "high" and "low" not in the strict sense of, e.g., (Pylkkänen [2002] 2008), but rather as a descriptive way of drawing a distinction that, as we will see, is very crucial for the phenomena discussed in this paper. What we call a high applicative here always has an external possessor/affected/causer flavor (Schäfer 2008;Deal 2017;Bosse et al 2012;Anagnostopoulou and Sevdali 2020) or an ethical dative flavor (Michelioudakis and Kapogianni 2013). 9 Most benefactives behave like IOs, while if there are benefactives that qualify as benefactives without falling in the category of either external possessors or experiencers/affected arguments, then they could be labeled as "free beneficiaries" and could be classified together with ethical datives.…”