External possession and multitransitivity | Dr. María Cristina Cuervo (University of Toronto)

Dative external possessors and argument realization are explored in a novel, understudied context: clauses with (arguably) three internal arguments, such as Spanish Marisa le pegó un cartel en la espalda a Emilio ‘Marisa stuck a note on Emilio’s back, [Lit. M. stuck a note on the back to Emilio]’ and German Er hat ihm ein Geheimnis ins Ohr geflüstert ‘He whispered a secret in his ear [Lit. he whispered him a secret in the ear]’. Here, the dative is thematically related to the Locative as the (inalienable) possessor of a body part (en la espalda de Emilio), is internal to the verbal phrase but appears external to the ground-figure relation between the direct object and the locative (un cartel en la espalda).  These tritransitive structures (TTRs) raise questions with respect to valence and selection, argumenthood and lexical underpinnings of interpretation. They further challenge our current understanding of possessor datives in terms of possessor raising, low or high applicatives, or Ground-Figure relations mainly developed in the context of ditransitive structures.  Based first on results from Spanish, a language in which TTRs are extremely productive, I show these datives are better analyzed as arguments merged below the verb and taking the [Theme-Locative]—a small clause-type relation—as its complement, introduced as a particular type of Middle Applicative (Cuervo 2020), or Wood & Marantz’s (2017) i*.  I outline initial (and future) work on the crosslinguistic distribution of TTRs along variation in morphosyntactic tracking of possession, within and beyond Indo-European languages. 

About the speaker:

Dr. Cuervo is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Spanish at the University of Toronto. Her research considers how specific grammatical phenomena in several languages (argument / event structure, dative arguments, morphological form) inform the broader question of how structural properties of language restrict and shape the construction of linguistic meaning. Her work has focused on the relative contribution of lexical verbal roots, prepositions and grammatical morphemes to the construction of verbal meanings. More recently, she has also been working in collaboration with students on the tense system in Spanish and how it is acquired. She draws on natural language data from a variety of sources (speakers’ intuitions, corpora and experimental data) and speaker populations (children, adult native speakers, and second language learners). Her research is couched within a linguistic theory that studies language as a human-specific cognitive faculty.