Contact and change in a Minimalist theory of variation

Historical Changes in Basque Dative Alternations: Evidence for a P-based (neo)derivational analysis

“…As described in many previous works (Trask 1997;Albizu 1998;Hualde & Ortiz de Urbina 2004;Rezac 2008;Etxepare & Oyharçabal 2013;Ariztimuño 2013;Etxepare 2014;among others), the presence of a dative argument in a Basque finite sentence is associated to three morphological characteristics: (i) a dative suffix shows up in the agreeing DP; (ii) person and number agreement appears in the auxiliary or the synthetic verb, and (iii) in the case of synthetic verbs a dative flag is inserted, a morpheme in the position immediately preceding dative agreement that indicates the presence of an applied argument.…”

“…There is plenty of syntactic and morphological evidence that the dative argument agreeing with the verbal complex is a DP and not a PP (Hualde 1986;Elordieta 2001;Albizu 2001;Oyharçabal 2010;Etxepare 2014;Pineda 2014, and references there). There is also general consensus that the canonical hierarchy among the three arguments agreeing with the verb in ditransitive constructions is the one observed in (6a).…”

“…3 Etxepare & Oyharçabal (2013) and Etxepare (2014) describe the main contexts where the changes occur in detail, but they mistakenly analyze these changes as chronologically simultaneous processes that constitute a single change. The reason is that most of their sources are late examples from a period -late XIX and XX Lapurdian authors and Oyharçabal's native speaker judgements of the same dialectwhen all the main changes have already taken place.…”

“…The resulting picture is a dative alternation where the agreeing applicative and the PP dative constructions have the same 3 The topic of agreementless datives has been relatively well studied among Basque grammarians. For the purpose of this paper see, especially, Pikabea 1993;Ortiz de Urbina 1995;Fernández & Landa 2009;Fernández, Ortiz de Urbina & Landa 2009;Etxepare & Oyharçabal 2013;Etxepare 2014;Ormazabal 2017, and references there. 4 To identify the source of the examples we follow the notation in the Classic Basque Corpus, followed by the page or the chapter, as specified there.…”

“…Since Lapurdian shared these common properties in earlier stages, the general description presented in that section is also to be considered, minimal details aside, as the initial stage of the dialects on which the diachronic changes have operated. Section 3 presents the main changes that occurred in the Lapurdian dialect; we base our description on Etxepare (2014) and, especially, Ormazabal (2017. Section 4 shows the impossibility of accounting for the linguistic changes from a non-derivational approach to dative alternation.…”