Low applicatives and affected applicatives in Turkish

Abstract

This paper argues that the dative beneficiary in Turkish has been incorrectly identified as a high applicative structure. While datives are felicitous with certain unergative and stative verbs, they show semantic restrictions that are unexpected on a high applicative analysis. I argue instead that Turkish has two applicative types: low (contra Tonyalı 2015a,b), relating the applied argument to the theme as possessor, and affected (Cuervo 2003), relating the applied argument to the state of the theme as beneficiary. Neither of these is a high applicative relating the argument to the event as a whole. This correctly captures the distribution of non-core datives in Turkish without overgenerating as the high applicative analysis does.