Dative Arguments in Turkish: Caused Experiencers versus Applicatives

Abstract

This paper investigates a type of construction in Turkish which is similar to Ingason's (2016) "caused experience" construction in Icelandic. The study draws a distinction between experiencers and applicatives through an investigation of novel data, and contends that these two arguments occupy distinct syntactic positions in the structure. The caused experiencers in Turkish are introduced by the syntactic head Aff(ect) of Bosse and Bruening (2011); Bosse et al. (2012), whereas applicatives are introduced by the Applicative head (Pylkkänen, 2008). The proposal also captures the at-issue meaning of the sentence as well as not-at-issue meaning (an implicature) of the sentence.