Polish is a language that shows dative arguments in many contexts, seemingly with a variety of meanings. (1) illustrates some of the most common dative uses in Polish, with labels commonly used in the literature.
(1) a. recipient
‘Tomek gave Ewa a book.’
b. benefactive
‘Tomek is cooking dinner for his children.’
c. affected possessor
‘Tomek broke Ewa’s vase.’
d. experiencer
‘Tomek appealed to Ewa.’
e. affected agent
‘Ewa found it good/easy to sing this song.’
f. dative of ease/enjoyment Tomek
‘Tomek is singing (and he is enjoying it).’
At first glance, the meanings of the dative-marked DPs1 in (1) seem to be unre-lated. Because of this apparent lack of a common meaning denominator, many accounts of the Polish dative limit themselves to providing a list of the vary-ing dative uses (Bartnicka-Dąbrowska et al., 1964; Benni et al., 1923; Szober, 1953; Szupryczyńska, 1996; Wierzbicka, 1988, a.o.). Neither a unified meaning of the dative case is proposed, nor an explanation of how the same case could be assigned in such varying contexts. Wierzbicka, for example, notes that:
attempts to assign the Polish dative - or any other dative - a uni-tary meaning, necessarily have limited explanatory potential. If we want to be able to predict the entire range of uses that the dative has in a particular language, we have to establish a full list of se-mantic constructions permitting the use of dative in this language.
(Wierzbicka, 1988, 393)
The exact number of dative contexts in Polish differs from author to author.
(Wierzbicka, 1988, 427-433), for example, proposes the following, exhaustive list of dative uses in Polish:
(2) dative uses in Polish
causing to have, causing to be and to have,coming not to have, coming to be, coming to have more, causing to see, causing to hear for plea-sure, causing to know, causing to be able to do something, causing a change in someone’s possession,accidental change in someone’s posses-sion, lucky/unlucky agent, causing a change in a related person, some-thing bad happening to a related person, bad actions of related persons, warning, causing a change in a body part, coming into contact with a body part,coming close to a body part,accidental change in appearance, examining the body,looking at the body, unintentional feeling, uninten-tional thought,unintentional wanting,unintentional sensation, uninten-tional process in the body,unintentional change in position of body part, unintentional change in appearance, unintentional speech, agent viewed as experiencer
The list in (2) appears to be a collection of unrelated dative uses. It is difficult to see any link between, e.g.causing to haveandlooking at the body. To make things more complicated concerning any generalisations about dative uses, in principle, any verb type can license a dative-marked argument in Polish - whether stative
1Throughout this thesis, we abstract away from the discussion as to whether Polish nomi-nals are DPs or NPs. For consistency, we stick to using the term ‘DP’; however, with no particular theoretical significance.
or active, unergative or unaccusative, intransitive or (di)transitive. Consider some examples in (3).
(3) a. stative
‘Ewa’s pupils sat quietly during the classes.’
b. active
‘Tomek bought Ewa flowers.’
c. unergative
‘Tomek run to the shop for Ewa.’
d. unaccusative
Thus, making any generalisations about dative uses in Polish is challenging;
however, as we show in this thesis, it is not impossible.
In terms of the meaning of the dative, following Dąbrowska (1997), we propose in Chapter 2 that there are some limitations on dative licensing. Namely, datives must obligatorily denote (potential)affectednessof the entity encoded as the dative-marked argument. For example, in (3a), Ewa is affected by the fact that her students did not disturb her classes. In (3b), Ewa is positively affected by receiving the flowers. In (3c), the affectedness is due to the fact that Ewa does not have to run to the shop herself. In (3d), Ewa is negatively affected by the withering of her flowers. When it is highly unlikely that the dative-marked DP would be affected by the event, the sentences are degraded.
Consider the difference between the two sentences in (4).
(4) a. Sąsiad
‘The neighbour ran Ewa under her car.’
b. ??Sąsiad
‘The neighbour ran Ewa into the park.’
In (4), it is more probable thatEwa will be affected when her neighbour runs under Ewa’s car, as in (4a), not when he runs into a nearby park, as in (4b).
Because, as we propose in Chapter 2, (potential) affectedness of the entity lexicalised as a dative DP is a prerequisite for dative licensing, the lack of such affectedness results in the degraded status of (4b).
Alongside the idea that all dative uses in Polish can be unified under the notion of affectedness in semantic terms, we propose that the various Polish dative uses can also be unified in syntactic terms. Some syntacticians have un-dertaken similar attempts to unify all dative uses. For example for Spanish, a language in which dative arguments occur in similar contexts as in Polish, Cuervo (2003, 2010, 2014, 2015) proposes a theory that unifies Spanish datives under one licensing head - the Applicative (Appl). Following Pylkkänen (2002, 2008), Cuervo takes applicatives to be non-core arguments, and she proposes that Spanish datives merge verb-externally, as part of an applicative phrase, Ap-plP. Depending on the meaning and the syntactic behaviour of a given Spanish dative, it can merge above, below v, or between twovs. The position in which a given dative merges differentiates the various dative uses in Spanish.
Many have proposed various syntactic accounts for Polish datives. For ex-ample, indirect dative objects have been accounted for by, e.g. Citko (2011);
Dornisch (1998); Gogłoza et al. (2020); Witkoś (2007). An analysis of dative ex-periencers has been proposed by, e.g. Biały (2005); Bondaruk (2017); Bondaruk and Rozwadowska (2018); Bondaruk et al. (2017a,b); Bondaruk and Szymanek (2007); Dziwirek (1994); Gogłoza (2013); Gogłoza and Łęska (2018); Jiménez-Fernández and Rozwadowska (2016); Tajsner (2008); Wiland (2009, 2016); Ży-chliński (2016, 2018). The so-called out of control datives/affected agents have been analysed by, e.g. Cichosz (2012, 2014); Dziwirek (1994); Gogłoza (2017a);
Jabłońska (2007); Krzek (2012); Willim (2018). Benefactive datives have been briefly mentioned in, e.g. Dziwirek (1994); Krzek (2012). However, not many, with exceptions discusses below, have attempted to unify the various uses of the Polish dative under one account.
A recent theory of binding, proposed in, e.g. Gogłoza and Łęska (2018);
Gogłoza et al. (2020); Witkoś et al. (2018a,b, 2020), unifies various Polish da-tives, e.g. recipients, experiencers, or possessive dada-tives, under one account.
Based on binding phenomena, the authors argue that Polish datives can project high, in [Spec;vP], or low, in [Spec;VP]. In the analysis put forward in this thesis, we follow the insights of these authors concerning binding as a reliable diag-nostic for the relative position of a given dative-marked argument. Namely, we assume that the ability of a given dative argument to bind an anaphor indicates its high projection, while an inability to do so, signals a lower projection. How-ever, in contrast to Gogłoza and Łęska (2018); Gogłoza et al. (2020); Witkoś et al. (2018a, 2020), we assume that dative arguments are of the applicative
type, and thus they are projected in a low or high [Spec;ApplP] position. We additionally account for the other properties of datives in Polish, including case licensing and meaning commonalities.