From Dative to Accusative. An Ongoing Syntactic Change in Romance and Basque

Abstract

In Catalan, as well as in other Romance languages and Basque, there are several verbs which can take a dative- or accusative-marked complement of person, in Basque, a dative- or absolutive-marked one. This is the case of Catalan verbs trucar ‘phone’, telefonar ‘phone’, contestar ‘answer’, robar ‘rob’, pagar ‘pay’, pegar ‘hit’ and disparar ‘shoot’, among others. This case alternation is indeed a transition from dative to accusative. We are dealing with a process of syntactic change which reflects different stages of evolution depending on the dialectal or even idiolectal variety. In order to analyse this alternation, or this change from dative to accusative, we assume the idea that an unergative intransitive verb such as trucar (made up of a light verb and a nominal, as in fer truc ‘make a phone call’) followed by a complement denoting person actually corresponds to a ditransitive structure, this is to say, a structure with a direct and an indirect object (fer truc a algú ‘make a phone call to someone’). Likewise, we assume that, as in several ditransitive constructions, there is an applicative head relating the direct complement (truc) and the indirect complement (a algú). The properties of this functional applicative head will allow us to explain the change from the use of a dative complement (Li telefono) to the use of an accusative complement (El telefono) in the early stages in the process of change. Finally, we will see that in the final stage the process results in a true transitivization of the structure.

Keywords: syntactic variation, argument structure, dative, accusative, Romance languages, Basque