Linearization and unaccusativity: The relative order of dative and nominative arguments with five German verbs of success and failure

Abstract

The present study maps out the word order distributions in verb-second clauses of five German verbs of success and failure: gelingen ‘to succeed’, glücken ‘to succeed’, missglücken ‘to fail’, misslingen ‘to fail’, and missraten to fail’. Given their status as unaccusatives, they display an asymmetric mapping between case marking and thematic roles. As a consequence, several researchers have argued that they sanction an inversion of the canonical nominative-before-dative word order pattern. Two positions emerge: those scholars who associate these verbs with a dative-before-nominative order and those who claim that they license both a dative-before- nominative order as well as a nominative-before-dative order. A corpus study of 982 tokens principally shows the latter claim to be true in that, in a configuration with double NPs, the Nom-Dat order is attested 200 times (or 40%), and the Dat-Nom order 299 times (or 60%). Remarkably, when both arguments are realised as pronouns, the variation in word order is neutralised almost entirely in favour of the nominative-before-dative order.