Syntactic Functions - Focus on the Periphery

The third level is not properly linguistic, but serves as a tertium comparationis for linguistic strategies analyzed at the two lower levels. For example, in the German sentence Rita schnitt dem Kind die Haare 'Rita cut the child's hair', the NP dem Kind is a certain kind of adjunct (dativus sympatheticus) at level 1, a benefactive adjunct at level 2 and both a beneficiary and a possessor at level 3. At level 3, the relations among participants constitute a complex network only part of which is represented linguistically. From this point of view, a couple of functional subdomains of participation will be analyzed, including causation, benefaction, external possession and concomitance. Languages differ typologically by their choice as to which cognitive roles they express and which ones they leave to inference. In the above example, German leaves the possessive relation of the child to inference. In some participant constellations, the choice of a particular strategy is semantically motivated; in other constellations it is not so motivated, but may still be pursued by a language. For instance, Portuguese uses the above type of construction even in such sentences as descobri-lhe os defeitos 'I discovered his defects', where most languages would rather side with English. A language may be characterized at the typological level by the extension of a strategy over and above its proper functional domain.