Some reflections on Ethical Datives

Abstract

In this article I propose that ethical datives are regular datives except that, being adjuncts, their derivation is postsyntactic. First, I describe their semantic and morpho-syntactic properties, with special reference to the impossibility of clitic doubling. Then, I outline the analysis of dative constructions proposed in Ormazabal & Romero (2010; 2013b). The main insight is that the derivation of the doubling construction is different from the derivation without doubling, because it is obtained by incorporation of the pronoun on the applicative morpheme and then on the verb. In this way, doubling is not possible, which explains the morphosyntactic behaviour of these datives, as well as their interpretation.

https://doi.org/10.17398/2660-7301.42.233