Silke Lambert: Indirect Affectee as a semantic role complex

Case and its possible polysemies are a topic of recent interest (cf., e.g., Malchukov and Spencer 2009), to which this paper contributes by examining a polysemy often found in dative case. In many European languages including  German, dative can encode both beneficiary and maleficiary adjuncts (Er  mähte/zertrampelte mir den Rasen) as well as the possessor in an external possessor construction (Er küsste ihr die Hand). Seeing that dative has the marking of recipients in transfer events, described, e.g., by the verb give, as (one of) its prototypical function(s), these datives feature a recipient/beneficiary/maleficiary/affected possessor polysemy.
This paper proposes to treat cases (and other markers) exhibiting this polysemy as exponents of a semantic role complex, indirect affectee. Indirect affectedness is defined in terms of force dynamics (Talmy 1976) as the property of an event participant to receive force from another participant that is not the instigator of the event. The recipient falls under this definition by virtue of coming to possess something, that is, s/he is affected force-dynamically by the transferred item, which in turn is affected by the giver. The other semantic roles expressed by dative case are analyzed analogously, adding the observation that affectedness tends to evoke an affective reaction in sentient affectees (Jackendoff 2007) and thus accounting for the frequent interpretation of dative case as ‘personal’ or ‘emotional.’
Even though the paper focuses on European datives, the role complex of indirect affectee is also found in languages outside Europe, where the relevant exponents are often verbal affixes rather than case; examples are the Muskogean and Chadic languages. The indirect affectee role complex is thus cross-linguistically relevant and more than an areal phenomenon restricted to Europe. It provides a semantic basis for non-spatial recipient marking, i.e., such datives and other recipient markers that are not identical to the marking of spatial goals.