Abstract
The domain of dative case marking seems wider in northeastern Basque varieties than in central and western varieties: it covers DPs expressing purely spatial roles, such as goals of motion, and also complements of atelic aspectual verbs. In those contexts, the dative does not agree in person and number with the finite verb, an option that is otherwise not allowed to datives in Basque. This raises the question of the status of dative marking in those dialects. The chapter argues here that the spatial dative cases in northeastern Basque are not different from what we see in canonical dative DPs of central and western varieties: they are case suffixes, attached to nominal phrases and expressing purely syntactic relations. The chapter argues that the kind of functional support necessary to license case in verbal predicates can also be found internal to adpositional phrases, within certain conditions. Concretely, the chapter capitalizes on recent work by Koopman (2000), Tortora (2009), and Den Dikken (2010) and argue that the spatial dative cases of northeastern Basque are licensed in an aspectual projection internal to a phrase headed by a silent directional adposition. This silent directional adposition is the only difference between central and western varieties, on the one hand, and northeastern ones, on the other. The argument includes a detailed discussion of some of the aspects involved in the syntax of adpositional phrases in Basque.
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