Benefactive constructions

This book is a Ph.D dissertation in which I argue that two suffixes in the Afroasiatic language Hausa are polysemous, the causative -aC and the benefactive -aC suffixes. These, as well as the related caused-motion suffix -aC, have high transitivity features of the kind described in Hopper and Thompson 1980. These features manifest themselves differently in the three constructions: The benefactive is associated with perfective aspect and a highly affected indirect object. The causative and caused-motion constructions have highly affected causees and mover themes, but is not associated with perfective aspect. The billiard ball model within Cognitive Grammar theory and Hopper and Thompson’s high transitivity model are used to explain the typical characteristics of these constructions In the benefactive the models explain how the indirect object in the benefactive is acted on by the agent to produce the highly affected indirect object participant. I explain the affectedness of the indirect object participant in the benefactive construction by pointing to the prototypical human/animate value of this participant which makes it able to resist agentive influence (it can resist moving or acting), but this also makes it an incremental theme (it absorbs the energy instead of transmitting it further down the action chain), hence the affectedness. The causative and caused motion-constructions by contrast, are not subject to perfective aspect meaning. I explain this by pointing to the fact that the themes in the caused-motion construction typically are inanimate, and thus do not provide resistance to being acted on; they therefore become movers (the themes that are movers for the reason of being objects of lexical motion verbs will be added extra motion, a stronger effect than would have been the case without the -aC suffix). The reason why causees are not incremental themes is that they are secondary agents or made to go through a change, that is, the energy is transmitted into action or change and not absorbed. The dissertation also finds dialectal evidence that the -C of the -aC suffix is/was an agreement marker in concord with one of the sentential arguments. It is shown that this marker is linked to attention to the argument it agrees with and that the target can change if focus(attention) is shifted to another participant/argument in the clause. This, and the fact that agreement markers have developed into high transitivity markers, are a cross-linguistic phenomena. Evidence is also brought forward to show that benefactive-causative polysemy is common cross-linguistically. Finally, the general view that there is only partly overlapping phonology of the -aC causative and benefactive suffixes is seriously challenged (-ar/-as CAUS vs. -ar/BEN). It is shown that in at least three out of four dialects under discussion, there is no phonological difference in the causative and the benefactive. A new variant is also attested, the CAUS/BEN -at suffix, widely used around Sokoto.

In this study, we revisit the history of the English dative and benefactive alternations in the light of De Smet et al.'s (2018) model of language change. Countering traditional competition models, this model admits that the degree of functional overlap between two distinct linguistic units may increase over time, a process the authors label attraction, which ultimately rests on analogy. Adopting this perspective , we propose that the restructuring of these alternations took place over at least the following four stages: 1) in Old English, the double object construction (DOC) is found with verbs of transfer such as give and send as well as verbs of creation and (possibly) pure benefaction, coding both dative and benefactive scenarios ; 2) starting from the Middle English period, attraction takes place between DOC and a periphrastic construction featuring the preposition to (to-POC) with transfer verbs such as give as well as verbs of creation such as make; 3) later on, possibly from the end of the Middle English period, to-POC with verbs of creation such as make disappears in favour of DOC and a new periphrastic construction featuring the preposition for (for-POC), used also with verbs of pure benefaction; 4) the last stage involves the shedding of pure benefaction from DOC, which instead is still found with for-POC.

This article describes the syntax and semantics of benefactive and comitative constructions in Dalabon, a Gunwinyguan language of Australia (non-Pama-Nyungan). After having described the respective subcategorisation operations and meanings of each of these constructions, I show that the criterion for using benefactive constructions is the animacy of the benefactive participant, whereas the criterion for using comitative constructions is the semantic role of the argument: the Dalabon comitative marker selects arguments with typical "comitative" meaning (accompaniment and instrument). In addition, I show that the comitative construction has developed a cross-linguistically unusual semantic extension towards the notion of transfer. When combined with verbs of attainment ('get', 'pull', etc.), Dalabon comitative constructions express malefactive transfer (or removal, i.e. the opposite of giving). Comparing Dalabon with neighbouring languages of the same family reveals that this extension is not limited to the Dalabon language, but also occurs in Bininj Gun-wok and Rembarrnga, including with comitative markers that are not cognate with the Dalabon marker. In addition, the Dalabon comitative constructions can also express the transfer of contents of communication with verbs meaning 'tell' or 'ask', an extension that is not attested in Bininj Gun-wok or Rembarrnga.

This paper discusses recent LFG proposals on resultative and benefactive constructions. I show that neither resultative nor benefactive constructions are fully fixed and that this flexibility requires traces or a stipulation of con-structional templates at several unrelated places in the grammar, something that is not necessary in lexical approaches. A second part of the paper deals with the active/passive alternation and shows that language-internal generalizations are missed if constraints are assumed to be contributed by phrase structure rules. A third part examines the parallel constructions in German and shows that cross-linguistic generalizations are not captured by phrasal approaches.

Lamaholot is a Central Malayo-Polynesian language of eastern Indonesia and is spoken in the eastern part of Flores Island and neighboring islands. The Lewotobi dialect of this language has two kinds of verb alternations of theoretical interest: the ditransitive and the benefactive alternations. On the one hand, verbs of transferring ownership such as neĩ ‘give’ can appear in both prepositional recipient and ditransitive constructions. The alternation held between the two construction types is referred to here as the ditransitive alternation. On the other hand, certain verbs of transaction and service such as hope ‘buy’ can be involved in the benefactive alternation, which is observed between benefactive serial verb and benefactive constructions.The purpose of this paper is to provide the description and analysis of the ditransitive and the benefactive alternations in light of recent studies of ditransitive and benefactive constructions (Kittilä 2005; Malchukov, Haspelmath & Comrie 2010, to name a few).

In this article I studied the two predicative possessive constructions in Gban, which belong to the “locational” and “adnominal” formal types (lit. “A house is on John” and “John’s house exists”). They were found to be almost complementarily distributed according to which semantic types of possession they can express.
The second, “adnominal”-type predicative possessive construction underwent a more detailed study.
Although it has been doubted by some linguists whether there are in fact any true “adnominal” predicative possessive constructions in the languages of the world (i.e. those that are indeed based on a genuine single NP such as [John’s car]), Gban does seem to provide such a case. The “Possessor + Possessee” complex in the second predicative possessive construction here shows many properties of a single constituent and shows no differences in the syntactic behaviour from unambiguous possessive NPs in examples like ‘I saw John’s car’.
At the same time, both the “Possessor + Possessee” complex and unambiguous possessive NPs in Gban only partially correspond to the theoretical expectations for an “ideal” possessive NP. They answer to these expectations in the more syntax-oriented properties, but deviate from them in the more pragmatic~semantic properties.
One of these latter properties which seem unusual for NPs is the ability of both the “Possessor + Possessee” complex in the second construction and unambiguous possessive NPs to be sharply pragmatically “split”. While one part (Possessor) is fully active and topical, the other part (Possessee) can be unidentifiable and part of the focus. Cf. the possibility of questions such as, literally, “Your WHAT is there?” (‘What do you have’) or “Their WHAT did you see?” (‘What did you see of theirs?’).
In the second predicative possessive construction there is also a semantic “split” — what looks and behaves syntactically as a single possessive NP here expresses, in fact, two participants of the (semantic) predicate at the same time.
After that, I briefly discussed another phenomenon that demonstrates similar behaviour. There exists in Gban an alternative way of coding recipient and recipient-benefactive participants: by an adnominal NP inside the direct object NP (lit. “I bought [his clothes]” for ‘I bought clothes for him’). And in these contexts we again observe the same pragmatic “split”, and also a semantic “split”, with a single NP expressing both the undergoer and the recipient(-benefactive).
To sum up, possessive noun phrases in Gban seem to have an unusual degree of pragmatic and semantic flexibility. This flexibility can be best seen in the “adnominal”-type predicative possessive construction and in the adnominal coding of recipients/recipient-benefactives. And we can also make a conjecture that probably it is this flexibility in the first place that allows such peculiar NP-based constructions to arise in a language.

In this paper we describe the pragmatic, lexical and syntactic properties of the Syrian Arabic Coreferential Dative Construction (CDC), featuring a dative element bearing agreement features which are identical to those of the subject in the clause, the Coreferential Dative (CD), and an obligatory expression of attenuative vague measure, described by us in Al-Zahre & Boneh (2010). We first show that the CD, which has no truth conditional meaning, contributes to the creation of a Conventional Implicature (Horn 2004, Potts 2005). Second, we propose a way to compositionally integrate the CD into the derivation of these constructions by arguing that the visible pronominal features are non-referential but rather the morphological reflex of checked uninterpretable phi-features on a defective applicative head. To couch the analysis in a wider context, we show how it can extend to other categories of non-core dative in Syrian Arabic.
In this paper we describe the pragmatic, lexical and syntactic properties of the Syrian Arabic Coreferential Dative Construction (CDC), featuring a dative element bearing agreement features which are identical to those of the subject in the clause, the Coreferential Dative (CD), and an obligatory expression of attenuative vague measure, described by us in Al-Zahre & Boneh (2010). We first show that the CD, which has no truth conditional meaning, contributes to the creation of a Conventional Implicature (Horn 2004, Potts 2005). Second, we propose a way to compositionally integrate the CD into the derivation of these constructions by arguing that the visible pronominal features are non-referential but rather the morphological reflex of checked uninterpretable phi-features on a defective applicative head. To couch the analysis in a wider context, we show how it can extend to other categories of non-core dative in Syrian Arabic.

Like in Classical Arabic and other modern Arabic dialects, the preposition l- marks the dative also in the Jewish Arabic dialect of Baghdad (JB). Under the scope of the syntactic category of dative, one finds different semantic roles like recipients, benefactives, possessors, experiencers, and others. Moreover, some datives operate on the pragmatic rather than the semantic level of the clause. This paper defines and exemplifies seven different dative roles in JB based on their interpretive properties and accounts for their distinctive syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features.

In Koalib (Niger-Congo, Kordofanian branch, Heiban family), a basic verb can give rise to several verb extensions (VE), among which a benefactive and a malefactive. Section one deals with the main derivational characteristics (affixation, tonology, productivity, valency) of both VE. Section two proposes a more in-depth scrutiny of the morphology of those extensions in Koalib, examining various particular cases (lack of basic verb, double derivation, irregularities). Section three focuses on the semantics of Koalib bene-/malefactive VE, putting special emphasis on the semantic roles encoded by each extension, and on the diverse nuances of meaning they can convey. The conclusion lays the stress on the interest of Koalib (and more generally Kordofanian languages) data for typological studies of the notions of benefaction and malefaction in human language.

Together with other Northern Samoyedic languages, Enets shows a crosslinguistically unusual way of expressing benefactive semantics. The Enets benefactive construction consists of a specific “destinative” affix that marks the presence of a beneficiary in a given clause and of a possessive affix that marks the beneficiary itself. Both affixes are attached to one of the verb’s arguments. This makes the beneficiary encoded as an adnominal dependent of the verb’s argument. This paper has two goals. Firstly, a detailed description of the Enets benefactive construction is provided, including its morphology, morphosyntax, and peculiarities of the differential object marking. Secondly, we aim to establish crosslinguistic parallels with the Enets benefactive construction. While phenomena with similar semantic features have been attested in the world’s languages, we show that the Enets construction demonstrates a unique set of semantic and morphosyntactic properties.

This paper presents a corpus study of two ditransitive constructions in Enets (Uralic, Samoyedic): the standard ditransitive construction and the so-called Destinative construction, which includes a specific destinative nominal morpheme. The considerable size of the corpus used and the availability of a discourse context for the ditransitive clauses under investigation permits a nuanced description of the mutual distribution of the two competing constructions. We suggest that the distribution of the standard ditransitive construction and the Destinative construction depends on referential properties of the theme argument and on the information structure of the clause. The Destinative construction is used with indefinite themes, while the standard ditransitive construction is used with definite themes. Most often, a definite theme is accompanied by a specific recipient; the combination of an indefinite theme and a non-specific recipient is not attested at all in our data. We also add...

Extract from abstract: Possession is generally divided into two semantic types: inalienable and alienable. While inalienability signals “an indissoluble connection between two entities”, alienability encompasses “relationships of a less permanent and inherent type” (Chappell & McGregor 1995:4). For most Australian languages, the distinction between these semantic categories is reflected in the distribution of grammatical constructions that express possession. Alienable relationships are generally expressed with an Internal Possessor Construction (IPC) that codes the possessor as a modifier of the possessum, whereas inalienable relationships are commonly expressed with an External Possessor Construction (EPC) that treats the possessor as an argument of the clause (Dixon 2002:138; Meakins & Nordlinger 2014:205-206; Morphy 1983:122). However, Wubuy, (a.k.a. Nunggubuyu (Heath, 1984)), a polysynthetic head-marking language from South- East Arnhem Land, does not follow this typological tendency. This paper shows that it is within the domain of external possession that alienability affects the distribution of Wubuy possessive constructions, and when speakers wish to highlight the affectedness of an alienable possessor, they use the benefactive in a way that has not been identified by previous work on the language.