Non-canonical case marking and modality: The case of the Indo-European “gerundive + dative” construction

Friday January 24, 2013 at 14:15 – 16:00 (HF: 217)

In this presentation, I analyze gerundives in combination with the so-called “dative of agent” in six different Indo-European languages, namely Sanskrit, Avestan, Ancient Greek, Latin, Tocharian, and Lithuanian. Consider the following examples from Ancient Greek and Latin:

• hēmîn … pánta poiētéa                                                     Ancient Greek

us:DAT all:ADJ.NEUT.PL.NOM to-be-done:NEUT.PL.

‘Everything must be done by us’ (Xen. An. 3, 1, 35)

• desperanda tibi … concordia                                             Latin

to-be-despaired:NOM you:DAT harmony:NOM

‘You must not despair of harmony’ (Iuv. 6.231)

The gerundives poíētéa and desperanda qualify an entity, which should experience the event expressed by the verbal root from which these gerundives derive. The entity which is in patient-relation with the gerundive, is expressed with the nominative, while the entity carrying out the event is expressed with the dative.

Developing an idea, originally suggested by Hettrich (1990: 64ff), I argue that this particular combination mirrors a construction of Indo-European inheritance. The proposal will be advanced with the aid of the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar in which, the basic unit of language is the Construction, i.e. a form–function  correspondence, where no principled distinction between lexical items and complex syntactic structures is assumed. I will provide evidence that the structures investigated show similarities at a morpho-syntactic level (DAT – VB.ADJ (‘be’) – NOM), at a semantic level (modal meaning and low degree of transitivity), and also, to a certain extent, at an etymological level. In sum, they constitute form–meaning pairings, available as units of comparanda, as required by the Comparative Method, and can thus successfully be reconstructed for a common proto-stage.

With regard to the semantics of the construction, I will show that the notion of ‘participant-external modality’ (van der Auwera & Plungian 1998, Narrog 2010) and the modal meaning entailed by the gerundive are crucial for determining the argument structure of the construction. I will argue, therefore, that an analysis involving a dative subject, a nominative object and a modal reading instead of the ‘agentive/passive’ reading, is better equipped to account for the “gerundive + dative” construction than the standard analysis.

Serena Danesi, Postdoc (NonCanCase Project), LLE, University of Bergen.