Dativ alternations under the view of Constructions Grammar: an analysis of the verb senden

Abstract

This work presents an analysis of the dative alternance of the verb senden from German language. The theoretical assumptions from the Construction Grammar postulated by Goldberg (1995) regarding the ditransitive and its prepositional paraphrase and a verb-sensitive approach to the dative alternation by Rappaport Hovavand Levin (2008) are compared and used as a corpus analysis tool. By means of them, it is analysed whether the constructions constituted by the verb senden and the prepositional syntagma denote an event schemata caused possession or event schemata caused motion. The precepts raised by Adler (2011) in her studies about the dative alternance in German are presented, assisting in the event distinction denoted by the construction. Thus, the realized research reinforces the author’s reflections about the new facet of the preposition an that appears in transfer verbs - the addressee-an, supporting the argumentation about the fact that it is not the double object variant or the prepositional syntagma the responsible for the event denoted by the construction, but the arguments that constitute it. This research also proposes another kind of classification for the analysis of German language verbs that denote transfer event in clauses deprived of volitive agent: causal event as transfer (Goldberg 1995), in which X CAUSE Y (AFFECT) TO RECEIVE Z (EFFECT).

Keywords:
caused possession; caused motion; causal event as transfer