Binding German (In)direct Objects: Spell-Out Strategies for Disambiguation

Nicholas Twiner,Vera Lee-Schoenfeld

doi:10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4534

Abstract

Despite Grewendorf’s (1988) well-known German binding data with the double-object verb zeigen ‘show’, which suggests that the direct object (DO) is generated higher than the indirect object (IO), this paper argues for the canonical surface order of IO>DO as base order. Highlighting the exceptional status of Grewendorf's examples, building on Featherston & Sternefeld’s (2003) quantitative acceptability rating study, and exploiting the fact that zeigen can also be used as inherently reflexive with idiomatic meaning, and we appeal to Bruening's (2010) theory of idiom formation as well as the Encyclopedia within Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1997, Embick & Noyer 2007) and propose a flexible Spell-Out mechanism within a derivational approach to binding (e.g. Hornstein 2001 and Zwart 2002) that can override narrow syntactic case licensing by realizing nominals with different morphological case.

Highlights

The base order of internal arguments in German double object constructions has been argued to be determinable by binding facts
All the potentially ditransitive verbs discussed here, which have been used in the literature to argue for direct object (DO)(ACC) > indirect object (IO)(DAT) as underlying order based on object coreference binding facts like those discovered by Grewendorf (1988), have an inherently reflexive use
The solution we propose suggests a broader role of Spell-Out in disambiguating linearization structures

Summary

Introduction

The base order of internal arguments in German double object constructions has been argued to be determinable by binding facts (see e.g. Müller 1995 and Anagnostopoulou 2003). DITRANSITIVE VERBS BESIDES ZEIGEN.3 If there are other exceptional ditransitive verbs like zeigen ‘show’, which allow object coreference with DO(ACC) > IO(DAT) order but without involving a mirror image situation, the hair-salon-induced role reversal cannot be the whole story.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion