Instrumental prepositions and case: Contexts of occurrence and alternations with datives

Abstract

We will argue that instrumentals are the mirror image of dative/genitive obliques. We propose that both sets of adpositions/cases are elementary predicates, expressing a zonal inclusion (partwhole/possession relation); instrumentals reverse the direction of the relation with respect to datives/genitives. Our claim is that with-type morphemes provide very elementary means of attaching extra participants (themes, initiators, etc.) to events (VP or vP predicates) -with specialized interpretations derived by pragmatic enrichment (contextual, encyclopedic) at the C-I interface. We will extend our proposal to account for the observation that the instrumentals can be employed cross-linguistically in triadic verb constructions alternating with datives and we will broaden our discussion to account for dative/instrumental syncretism (eventually including DOM objects), arguing that the inclusion predicate (⊆) corresponding to 'to' or dative case and its reverse (⊇), corresponding to 'with' or instrumental case, may reduce to an even more primitive content capable of conveying inclusion in either direction. Finally, we will address ergative alignments, showing that languages may attach external arguments/agents either as possessors (⊆) or as causers (⊇) of a given event/state, yielding the two most widespread patterns of syncretism of the ergative morpheme, that is with either instrumentals or genitives/datives.

Derivational Relators in Italian

“…2 It is important to notice, for the purposes of our work, that Franco and Manzini (2017b) extend the 'inclusion' account to the other oblique morpheme most likely to appear as an inflectional case marker from a crosslinguistic viewpoint (see Caha 2009), namely the instrumental; in Italian, the instrumental is lexicalized by the preposition con (with). We follow Franco and Manzini (2017b) in using the cover term 'instrumental' for all the semantic flavors that may be introduced by with like morphemes (see Stolz et al 2006 for a full typological survey). Franco and Manzini (2017a)'s starting point is the observation originally developed in Levinson (2011), i.e., possession/inclusion relations can be realized by with morphemes at the level of noun phrases (cf.…”

“…(4) La donna con i bambini the woman with the children 'The woman with the children' Franco and Manzini (2017b) demonstrated that with-like inflections/prepositions express the reverse relation with respect to genitive and dative morphemes, given that the inclusee, rather than the inclusor, is introduced by the oblique case/adposition. Thus, for these with-like morphemes, they introduce the (⊇) label and content, as shown in the example (5).…”

‘Agreement of structural obliques’parameter

“…However the discussion to follow goes through if the ergative is conceptualized as an instrumental or other elementary relator (cf. Franco & Manzini 2017).…”

Missing Person

“…This second option would be compatible with the ⊇ operator (i.e. the reverse of ⊆) proposed by Franco & Manzini (2017), too, although they restrict its occurrence mainly to instrumentals contexts. Despite the differences across these accounts, they all essentially share the idea that relational heads are to be regarded predicatively: this is in line with the approaches to p in the extended PP.…”

“…Other constructions reduced to ⊆ are: have auxiliary(Manzini & Savoia 2011: chapter 6); dative, genitive, and ablative case, possessives, and the corresponding inflectional morphology(Manzini & Savoia 2011: chapter 8;Franco et al 2015;Manzini & Franco 2016); obliques(Franco et al 2021). Moreover,Franco & Manzini (2017) argue that instrumentals instantiate the inverse relation, i.e. superset-of '⊇'.…”