Two modes of dative and genitive case assignment: Evidence from two stages of Greek
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Two modes of dative and genitive case assignment: Evidence from two stages of Greek Elena Anagnostopoulou1 · Christina Sevdali2
Received: 23 December 2016 / Accepted: 8 February 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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.
B C. Sevdali
[email protected] E. Anagnostopoulou [email protected]
1
University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece
2
Ulster University, Jordanstown, UK
E. Anagnostopoulou, C. Sevdali
Keywords Dependent Case · Inherent Case · Dative · Genitive · Accusative · Greek · Prepositions · Passivization
1 Introduction This paper contributes an argument from two stages of Greek in favor of the proposal that there are two modes of dative and genitive objective case assignment:1 they are either prepositional or dependent cases, as also concluded by Baker and Vinokurova (2010) and Baker (2015) drawing on cross-linguistic evidence. Specifically, we compare the properties of dative and genitive objects in two different periods of Greek. Classical Greek (CG) had morphological dative and morphological genitive case productively marking direct objects (DOs) of monadic transitive verbs and indirect objects (IOs) in ditransitives. The distribution of these cases was subject to idiosyncratic information in transitives, in contrast to accusative case which was more productive and regular, and thematic information in ditransitives where dative was used for goals and ge
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