Dative Displacement in Basque

In this paper, we discuss differences across Basque dial cts in the accessibility of datives to absolutive-type agreement. In most varieties, in cluding Standard Basque, datives control a dedicated series of dative suffixes. In s ome varieties however, their agreement 'displaces' to take over morphology otherwise reser ved for the absolutive. To this phenomenon we refer as dative displacement . It is a rich domain in which to explore syntactic and morphological properties and paramete rs of dialectal variation: the basic morphology of more than fifty dative displacement d ialects has been documented and four have been examined in more detail for this wor k. Recent work a comparable agreement displacements reveals that sometimes they aff ct syntax rather than only morphology. This appears to be true for at least so me f Basque dative displacement as well, although much remains to be understood about the phenomenon. Our discussion first describes the phenomenon and its parametrizat ion cross Basque dialects in section 2, then outlines syntactic and morphological approa ches to it and their different predictions about its properties and parametrizabil ity in section 3, focusing on syntactic theories, to conclude with hints of its syntactic c haracter in section 4. Dative displacement lies at the cross-roads of two ways to treat the argument added to the plain transitive and unaccusative structures. T ransitives and unaccusatives have as core arguments the external argument EA and the int ernal argument O of transitives, and S of unaccusatives: SheEA boils waterO, WaterS boils. We will need differentiate O and S according to whether they stand in 'plain' transiti ves and unaccusatives, where we notate them O1, S1 as in send a letter O1, or combine with an added argument, in which case we notate them O2, S2 as in send someone a letter O2. The added argument will be refered to as the indirect object IO across the variety of str uctures or interpretations in which it participates, such as goal or benefactive: send, bake someone IO a cake. The addition of an IO to a plain structure leads to tw results cross-linguistically: primary-IO and dative-IO systems (Dryer 1986, Haspelmath 2005, Malchukov, Haspelmath and Comrie forthc). In primary-IO systems, the IO behaves like the O1/S1 for case and agreement, while the remaining O2/S2 t ends to behave differently. 1 In