Deceptive datives: Prepositional case in Latvian

The Case for Caseless Prepositional Constructions with voller in German

In this article I will focus on the German deadjectival quasi-preposition voller ‘full of’, which appears to occur with genitive, dative, accusative and even nominative argument forms, e.g.: eine Stadt voller Kindergen? ‘a city full of children’, eine Badewanne voller Wasserdat? ‘a tub full of water’, ein Koffer voller böse Gräuelacc? ‘a suitcase full of evil horrors’, Menschen voller Aberglaub...

Reconciling “possessor” datives and “beneficiary” datives – Towards a unified voice account of dative binding in German

This paper argues for a neo-Davidsonian voice approach in the spirit of Kratzer (1996, 2003) to the syntax and semantics of dative arguments in German, and against syntactic or lexical theories of possessor raising. The voice approach is developed in some detail for so-called “possessor” datives, and later on extended to “beneficiary” datives. It is argued that, in both cases, the local contrib...

I love me some datives: Expressive meaning, free datives, and F-implicature

In addition to introducing the very successful product line of conversational implicatures, Paul Grice and his successors have assembled an arguably inchoate class of phenomena under the trade name of CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE, whose reception in the scholarly marketplace has been somewhat bridled. A conventional implicature associated with expression E is a non-cancelable contribution to the co...

Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks : the case of over

D Atives In

(1) a. Japanese datives appear to systematically map, in properties, to English double object constructions (DOCs) and not to prepositional datives (Zushi 1992, Miyagawa and Tsujioka 2005). b. We argue (following Zushi 1992) that the “standard” order of arguments in Japanese datives is a derived one. c. We propose this follows from “weak ni’s” the fact that in Japanese, ni is never a case probe...