Edited by Jóhanna Barðdal, Na'ama Pat-El and Stephen Mark Carey
[Studies in Language Companion Series 200] 2018
► pp. 213–238
Germanic languages that retain case marking and oblique subjects may undergo a change in argument structure over time. Nominative Sickness in Germanic has been demonstrated by Eythórsson (2002) and Barðdal (2009, 2011) for verbal arguments in which obliques are replaced with the nominative. Additionally, formerly accusative subjects become dative, a process widely referred to as Dative Sickness or Dative Substitution in the international literature. Dative Sickness is found across the development of several Germanic Languages (Barðdal 2011; Dunn et al. 2017). However, a change in case marking from a dative subject to an accusative subject is not well attested. The following examination explores instances in which Dative Subject Constructions in Old High German experience Accusative Sickness in Middle High German. That is, they start occurring with an accusative argument instead of the earlier, historically correct, dative.