Applicative Alternations across Languages

• Applicant: Dr. Jens Hopperdietzel
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560538798

The relation of participants and events in grammars of natural languages (argument structure) is fundamental to linguistic research. Both in single languages and cross-linguistically, we have a good understanding of some of these relationships, in particular when it comes to subjects and objects, the most common grammatical functions, and how they relate to verbs. The relationship of less common arguments, such as those expressing instruments and beneficiaries (e.g. ‘for Mary’ in ‘I baked a cake for Mary’), to verbs is not as well understood, however. These so-called applied arguments can be added to a verb’s argument structure by various grammatical means, giving rise to different ways of expressing similar meanings. Consider, for example, how the participant ‘Mary’ is introduced in ‘I baked a cake for Mary’ compared to ‘I baked Mary a cake’. These different means of expression are called alternations. The proposed AAAL network studies alternations that involve applicative constructions and their properties both within single languages and cross-linguistically. Applicative alternations exhibit a range of morphosyntactic types as they differ in whether an applied argument is an argument or not (roughly ‘Mary’ vs. ‘for Mary’), in how the applied argument may have case or agreement-marking, and in their word order (consider ‘... baked a cake for Mary’ vs. ‘... baked Mary a cake’) and how that might affect question or passive constructions. The network’s approach takes the novel angle of investigating alternations both in applicative constructions proper and related constructions, such as lexical ditransitives (‘I gave Mary a cake’ vs. ‘I gave a cake to Mary’). This approach will rely and build on the expertise of linguists with backgrounds in both formal and typological approaches. The proposed network thus brings together researchers from different linguistic subfields across morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics; and equally important, from across several language families to improve our understanding of applicative constructions and alternations. The network focuses on three main aspects of applicative alternations, first, their variation in across languages (what types of alternations do languages exhibit and what regularities do we find?), second, their productivity (how frequent are particular types of applicative constructions and alternations?), and third, their association with information structure (how are notions like topic or focus expressed across alternations?). Each of these aspects will be addressed within three distinct work packages, which investigate their role in argument–non-argument alternations (WP1), case and agreement alternations (WP2), and word order alternations (WP3).

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Jozina Vander Klok