Dative Subjects? The datiuus auctoris and Modal Syntax in Early Latin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/emerita.2025.1404Keywords:
Early Latin, dative of Agent, gerundive, grammatical subject, non-canonical subjectAbstract
This article examines the notion of grammatical subject in gerundive + dative + sum constructions in Plautus and Terence (3rd-2nd centuries BCE). It is proposed that the dative that appears in this type of construction, traditionally described as a subtype of dative of interest and treated as an adjunct, may serve as a non-canonical subject. Based on a corpus of Archaic Latin, its subject status is evaluated through syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic-referential tests proposed cross-linguistically. The results show that, in these structures, the dative more frequently than the nominative passes syntactic subjecthood tests, additionally encoding the semantic role S and exhibiting features typically associated with subjects: higher animacy, definiteness and topicality. The nominative, by contrast, tends to denote [-animate], [-definite], and [+Focus] entities. These findings are consistent with Danesi et al.’s (2017) proposal to regard the dative as a potential subject in modal contexts of low transitivity.
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