Ditransitive verbs in Latin: A typological approach

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the behavior of Latin verbs with three arguments basically encoding the transfer of a Theme from an Agent to a Recipient: these verbs, labelled as ditransitives within the framework of linguistic typology, will be analyzed here on the basis of this theoretical approach. Across languages, the object arguments of ditransitives may be marked as the Patient of monotransitives or differently from it, giving rise to various types of alignment: the most frequent are the indirective, the secundative and the neutral alignment. In Latin, these three basic types of alignment are attested with ditransitives in the active and passive voice, although they are differently distributed across the lexicon. Moreover, some verbs allow more than one type of encoding of the relevant arguments, showing alternating alignments. I shall focus on the reasons of the distribution and alternation of the three types, with the goal of providing a point of departure for a deeper understanding of ditransitives in the Latin language.

The Missing Dative Alternation in Romance: Explaining Stability and Change in the Argument Structure of Latin Ditransitives

“…As a rule, these verbs take the same indirect construction (accusative + dative) used by give verbs, although they may substitute the dative with a/ab (less frequently e/ex ) plus the ablative to denote the person or the inanimate entity from whom/which something is taken away. As pointed out in Napoli (2018: 63–64), given that a/ab plus the ablative is typically employed in Latin to express the semantic role Source , to be understood as ‘the place from which a trajector moves along a trajectory’ (Luraghi 2010: 32), its extension to ditransitives depends upon the same metaphorical mechanism presupposed by the extension of the prepositional construction with ad plus the accusative to verbs of possessive transfer (see Section 4). This means that the act of taking away something from somebody (or from something else) is equally conceived of as a motion event, occurring across a physical space, as with give verbs, but in the reverse direction.…”

“…It is worth stressing at this juncture that this semantic restriction is consistent with a Classical Latin pattern (Pinkster 2015: 138), presumably because abstract entities are less prototypical Ts. As such, they are less suited to the accusative case, the case of prototypical ‘patients’ and accommodate instead the instrumental semantics of the ablative case, this supporting the idea of a gift as ‘equipment’ one is provided with (on this pattern in Classical Latin, see also Napoli 2018: 66–67). In conclusion, our data ultimately testify to a scenario of great diachronic stability.…”

“…Moreover, lexical idiosyncrasy too can interfere by giving rise to stability rather than change, for example, in languages where, with ditransitives, case marking is assigned to a large extent depending on lexical constraints (see, e.g. Dahl 2020 on Vedic, Napoli 2018 on Latin).…”

“…In this section, we shall briefly present a typological classification of Latin ditransitives, which contributes to systematizing the diversity of syntactic constructions typical of the verbs semantically belonging to this group. Following Napoli (2018), the three main alignment types identified in Table 1 (Section 2) are all attested in Latin:…”

“…The alternation of indirective and secundative alignment with dono can be explained as originating by analogy with three‐place verbs encoding an instrumental argument with the ablative (like instruo ‘to equip’) and as motivated by pragmatic factors (mainly, the focalization of the R; for discussion and references, cf. Napoli 2018: 64–68).…”