Chapter 4. A macrorole approach to dative subjects

Abstract

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.