Reviewed by Cathryn Donohue, RSPAS, Australian National University

This collection of papers grew out of a workshop held in conjuction with the 26th German Linguistics Society annual meeting in 2004. The workshop presented the latest research on datives and similar constructions from a morphological, functional, or semantic perspective, regardless of theoretical persuasions. The collection nicely reflects this goal and provides an excellent overview of datives, particularly in German.

The volume is divided into three sections. In Section 1, Werner Abraham (3–46) provides a comprehensive overview of recent work on datives surveying different research foci and contemporary analyses.

Section 2 consists of seven papers that focus on datives in Germanic languages. Thomas McFadden (49–77) proposes that dative case assignment in German and Icelandic is generated under the specifier of the applicative phrase [Spec, ApplicativeP]. In contrast with inherent case assignment in a government and binding or principles and parameters approach, McFadden claims that morphological case interprets the output of the syntax. Similarly, Andrew McIntyre (185–212) compares datives in German with the subjects of have in English. He proposes an analysis that treats these constructions as inherently case-marked specifiers of an applicative light verb. In another work on German datives, André Meinunger (79–101) proposes a universal hierarchy of arguments (i.e. subject, indirect object, direct object, prepositional phrase, and verb: [SU[IO[DO[PP (V)]]]]), which contrasts with the popular view that there are three types of ditransitive verbs in German. Philippa Cook (141–84) presents an alternative explanation for the different unmarked orders of datives (as verb-distal or verb-close) in German ditransitives within lexical functional grammar’s lexical mapping theory. Rather than attempting to unify the data, she claims that the different orders result from different conceptual structures.

Patrick Brandt (103–39) provides a semantic analysis that unifies the syntactic parallels between double-object and experiencer datives in German (i.e. cipients). Focusing on the case of relative pronouns, Jürg Fleischer (213–38) analyzes the alignment of dative case and indirect objects in a range of German(ic) dialects and languages. Katrin Schmitz (239–68) discusses the acquisition of German dative case by monolingual German and bilingual German/French and German/Italian children. The bilingual data challenge the common assumptions about the acquisition of dative case, and Schmitz nicely accounts for the findings by appealing to both the complexity of the German case system and the influence of the Romance language.

Section 3 presents research on datives ‘Beyond Germanic: From Albanian to Tagalog’. Dalina Kallulli (271–300) examines data with unaccusative morphology from a number of Indo-European languages and proposes that the passive, anticausative, and middle constructions all result from suppression of a feature in little v. Jelena Krivokapić (301–29) explores the syntax and semantics of datives in adjectival constructions in Serbian. She analyzes bare predicative constructions within Christopher Kennedy’s general theory of the semantics of adjectives (Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997).

The final paper was not originally presented at the workshop but is an excellent addition to the volume. Walter Bisang (331–81) ventures outside Indo-European languages to investigate the causes of the occasional asymmetry between subjects and objects in Chinese and Japanese and to map the arguments to grammatical roles in Tagalog. He notes primary causes other than semantic roles and argumenthood and discusses problems his analyses may pose for current theoretical frameworks.

While greater space could have been devoted to non-Germanic languages, the volume is coherent, well-edited, and overall a valuable resource for those working on dative case, empirically or theoretically, from a syntactic or semantic perspective.