The essays in this section (with one exception) centre on a characteristic construction of Dravidian syntax, the so-called “dative subject construction.” We begin by arguing that this construction has been misanalysed; and that the dative argument is not the syntactic subject of this construction. This argument is made in Chapter 18.
A more significant departure from the standard discourse on this structure is that we shift attention from the case of the ‘subject’ to the category of the predicate. We point out that there is a hitherto unnoticed correlation—a negative correlation—between the experiencer argument having dative case and the predicate being an adjective. That is, the experiencer argument is never dative when the predicate is an adjective. We then pursue two lines of inquiry. In one, we go on to embed this observation in a general theory about how certain lexical categories arise in Universal Grammar: Adjective and Verb arise when dative case is incorporated into a nominal predicate (see Chapters 17, 20, 21, and 23). In a second line of inquiry, the relationship between the experiencer and the experience is identified as a possessive relation marked by dative case. Adopting Ramchand’s (2008) decomposition of the event structures of verbs, we analyse this construction as exhibiting a rich Result sub-event, and generalize it with the double object dative construction in English (see Chapter 24).
Chapter 22 illustrates how dative case bleaches a noun into an adposition. Dative—and also genitive—case in Kannada induce a “region” or axial part reading for N denoting spatial axes (Svenonius 2006). Genitive case also allows the attributive use of N in Kannada (cf. a night of darkness). The possessive-as-adjective strategy in languages has recently received some attention from a semantic point of view (Koontz-Garboden and Francez 2010). Its syntax bears investigation as well, in comparison to straightforward recursive possessives, and from the cartographic point of view (Cinque 2010). Since dative case on predicative N is claimed to be the genesis of the category Adjective, these two cases, dative and genitive, are seen to once again pattern together.
The fourth essay in this section (Chapter 19)—the ‘one exception’ that we mentioned—is on what traditional grammars of Dravidian have called ‘conjunct verbs’ or ‘conjunctive participles.’ These terms indicate their conjunction-like semantics; the second term also indicates their non-finiteness. The important function of these verbal elements in Dravidian syntax cannot be overestimated, for they do the work of modals, auxiliaries, and adpositions. We however treat them as serial verbs, a well-known phenomenon from the study of African languages and pidgins/creoles. In doing so, we situate Dravidian in the larger picture of the study of this structure in the world’s languages; and we bring to bear Dravidian data on the theory about this structure.
Dative subjects—or as they have also been called, “quirky subjects,” a broader term that also includes accusative, genitive, and other non-nominative subjects—are not confined to Dravidian; they have been counted as an areal feature of South Asian languages (Masica 1976). In fact, their spread is far greater: they are found in East Asian languages like Japanese and Korean (Ura 2000), in American Indian languages (Cole & Jake 1978), and also in European languages (den Besten 1989, Sigurdsson 1992, Maling 2001). In the last-mentioned group, the quirky-case subjects of the Scandinavian languages have given rise to a lively and ongoing debate on the case-assigning and agreement mechanisms of linguistic theory (see Sigurdsson 2012 and references cited there). Without trying to survey the literature on this topic, we may point the reader to two collections of papers that resulted from two conferences on this topic: Verma & Mohanan (1990), which contains papers presented at a conference on “Experiencer Subjects in South Asian Languages” at the University of Wisconsin in 1988; and Bhaskararao & Subbarao (2004), which contains papers from a conference on “Non-Nominative Subjects” held at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 2001 (our Chapter 18 was presented at this conference). (The second collection contains also papers on this phenomenon in non-South Asian languages.)
There have also been very exciting developments in the general theory of Case. Case-stacking is being investigated (Richards 2007, Pesetsky 2013); and in the framework of Nanosyntax (which is originally attributable to the work of Michal Starke, cf. Starke 2009), a theory of “case-peeling” is being worked out in the important work of Pavel Caha (Caha 2009): the idea here is that every case ‘contains’ all the cases below it in the Universal Case Hierarchy, and when a syntactic operation removes the top case (or cases), the case below it is revealed. This is a very dynamic picture of how syntactic operations change cases on nominal expressions. It is also now suggested that cases move from one syntactic object to another, and get absorbed by other lexical heads. This last development was in a sense anticipated by Kayne’s (1993) proposal—based on earlier ideas of Benveniste (1966) and Freeze (1992) —that the English verb ‘have’ is generated when the copular verb ‘be’ incorporates the dative case of a dative subject. Our proposal—in the essays given here as Chapters 17, 20, 21, and 23—that the lexical categories of Adjective and Verb are generated in the syntax when dative case incorporates into nominal predicates, can be seen in the context of such ideas in this area.
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