Dative As A Semantic Role

Overview

The dative case is a grammatical case that often signifies the semantic role of the recipient, beneficiary, or experiencer of an action or state. While its grammatical form varies across languages, its underlying semantic function remains consistent.

Key Concepts

Understanding the dative’s semantic role involves recognizing its typical uses:

• Recipient: The entity that receives something. (e.g., “I gave the book to Mary.”)
• Beneficiary: The entity for whose benefit an action is performed. (e.g., “She baked a cake for her son.”)
• Experiencer: The entity that experiences a feeling, sensation, or mental state. (e.g., “It seemed to him that the story was true.”)

Deep Dive

In many Indo-European languages, the dative case is morphologically marked. However, languages like English often use prepositions (like ‘to’ or ‘for’) to express these dative-like semantic roles. The dative can also express indirect objects, which frequently align with recipient or beneficiary roles.

Applications

The dative semantic role is fundamental in:

• Analyzing sentence structure and argument roles.
• Understanding verb valency and argument structure.
• Cross-linguistic grammatical comparisons.

Challenges & Misconceptions

A common misconception is that the dative case *always* corresponds to a grammatical indirect object. While often related, the semantic role of recipient or experiencer can sometimes be expressed by other grammatical constructions, and not all indirect objects are strictly datives semantically.

FAQs

What is the primary semantic function of the dative?

It typically marks the recipient, beneficiary, or experiencer.

How is the dative expressed in English?

Often through prepositions like ‘to’ and ‘for’, or as an indirect object.