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Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects: The Reykjavík-Eyjafjallajökull papers
Edited by Jóhanna Barðdal, Na'ama Pat-El and Stephen Mark Carey
[Studies in Language Companion Series 200] 2018
► pp. 85–114

Chapter 4
A macrorole approach to dative subjects

| University of California, Davis
| University of California, Davis

The arguments of certain Spanish verbs of psychological experience exhibit morphosyntactic properties similar to those of Germanic “oblique subject” verbs, as described, for example, in Barðdal (2001) and Barðdal & Eythórsson (2005). In this article, we show how the behavior of dative experiencers looks neither “quirky” nor “non-canonical” when grammatical privilege is accounted for directly in terms of semantic macroroles in the sense of Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin 2005), provided that the standard set of Actor (A) and Undergoer (U) macroroles is augmented to include a third, i.e., Receptor (R), that corresponds roughly to Fillmore’s (1968) Dative category of semantic case and the Relational Grammar indirect object relation (Perlmutter 1984). Adding R to the set of macroroles enables us to account straightforwardly for the subject and non-subject properties of dative experiencers in Spanish, as well as parallel properties of possessor/recipient arguments across construction types, without having anything hinge either on dative case per se or on the notion of subject.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammatical privilege in Spanish
    • 2.1Verbs of psychological experience
    • 2.2Basic word order
    • 2.3Focus-fronting and VS order
    • 2.4VS order in Wh questions
    • 2.5SV order in embedded clause with a long-distance dependency
    • 2.6SVO order with topic fronting
    • 2.7The causative construction
    • 2.8Impersonal se and passive constructions
    • 2.9Control
    • 2.10Reflexive/reciprocal se
  • 3.The three-macrorole analysis
    • 3.1The R macrorole
    • 3.2Mapping of arguments to macroroles with R in the game
    • 3.3Passive and impersonal se constructions
    • 3.4Reflexive/reciprocal se construction
    • 3.5The causative construction
    • 3.6Word order phenomena and case indexing
    • 3.7Control
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.200.04far
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