German inherent datives and argument structure

Two lines of recent research are brought together to argue that the defining characteristic of German inherent dative arguments is not morphological but syntactic. On the one hand, evidence is mounting that dative objects with two-place verbs, as well as those with three-place verbs, differ in their argument-structural status from direct objects receiving structural accusative case. On the other hand, the GB idea that movement is case-driven, which was central to previous analyses of the behavior of inherent datives under passivization, has been considerably weakened. It is proposed instead that the special syntactic, semantic and morphological properties of dative arguments should be derived from the way in which they are introduced into the structure. This not only accounts for the German data that form the basis of the discussion, but can also be more easily extended to languages like Icelandic, which are famously problematic for the original inherent Case analysis.

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