Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

1.11. Olga Borik (UNED, Madrid): Commitment datives (joint work with Ismael Iván Teomiro García) [hybrid]

In this talk, we focus on a specific use of the dative case – commitment dative – and put forward the hypothesis that these datives can be used to overtly express commitment of the speaker or the hearer. We argue that this type of datives cannot be easily explained by applicative-based analyses (see Cuervo 2020 for an overview) without radically changing the semantics of the applicative because they are restricted to particular types of speech acts, namely, commissives and directives. Instead, we rely on the proposal of Geurts (2019), who offers a commitment-based analysis for basic speech acts, including commissives and directives. Drawing on empirical data from Russian and Spanish, we argue that the main contribution of commitment datives is to overtly mark the commitment of the speaker to the goal of making the proposition expressed by the sentence true (Geurts 2019).