The English Dative: verb typology in Elizabethan English

OLIVER JOSE MARIA

La Plata

Jornada; VII Encuentro Académico del Departamento de Lenguas y Literaturas Modernas, FaHCE, UNLP; 2015

Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, UNLP

From the semantic-syntactic framework proposed by Jaume Mateu i Fontanals (2000, 2002), we consider argument structure, as defined in terms of relational-semantic construals, to be an essential component, indeed the primary one, of any morphosyntactic derivation. These construals can be represented by means of relational-semantic tree diagrams, which render visible the way the arguments are related to one another by means of a number of primitive predicates encoding relations such as cause, telicity (i.e. change and state) and direction (i.e. terminal and central coincidence). Thus, taking into account that a whole verb typology can be derived from this framework, this paper aims to extend these theoretical principles to the phenomeon of unergative verbs in Elizabethan English version of Shakespeare?s Works. The examples analysed resemble Spanish in certain respects, allowing us to posit the presence of a dative case in some of these cases, while they also differ from the way their corresponding Present-day English verbs behave.