Romanian applicative constructions

Abstract

The aim of this work is the investigation of the syntactic and semantic properties of Romanian clitic doubled la/real dative arguments. The proposal of this thesis is that clitic doubled la/real dative arguments are applicative arguments. The premise of assuming the existence of applicative constructions in Romanian is the alternation of clitic doubled/non clitic doubled dative arguments. Traditional grammar assumes that Romanian dative arguments are optionally clitic doubled. This thesis argues that this optionality is only apparent, and that the dative clitic is the morphological spell-out of an applicative head which licenses the dative argument as its specifier and relates it to the structure it takes as a complement. Applicative arguments are morphologically marked, can appear with both transitive and intransitive verbs, and have a wide range of meanings. The series of meanings of Romanian applicative (i.e., clitic doubled dative) arguments are foreseen by the series of the complements an applicative head may take or by the series of applicatives of which a phrase can be a complement. This proposal provides the set of positions into which an applicative head can merge and license a dative argument, as well as the set of interpretations the argument can obtain in each position. The set of positions may be verified cross-linguistically, but languages can differ with respect to the positions into which an applicative head is allowed to merge. These assumptions generalize to applied arguments in languages in which they are not marked by dative case (e.g., Greek, English and Bantu languages). To the best of the thesis author's knowledge, this is the first attempt both to propose the existence of applicative constructions in Romanian and to investigate la datives.