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Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics edited by Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon ISBN 1-57473-415-6 library binding vii+461 pages publication date: 2006 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Sandhya Sundaresan The Argument Structure of Verbal Alternations in Tamil 390-398 (complete pdf) A significant question that arises in the study of verbal alternations crosslinguistically is whether the two alternants are transformationally derived from a single argument structure (Larson1988, Baker 1988) or whether they are associated with distinct argument structures (Harley 2002, Marantz 1993). This paper provides additional evidence from Tamil for the latter, non-derivational approach. The author investigates goal and beneficiary ditransitive structures in Tamil and shows that there is a systematic syntactico-semantic alternation in these structures; furthermore, she shows that these differences correspond to differences between double-object and for/to-PP structures in languages like English (Oehrle:1976, Harley:2002), Japanese (Miyagawa:2004), Greek (Anagnostopoulou 2003, 2005), and others. Based on this, she proposes argument structures for the verbal alternants involved in the dative and benefactive alternation in Tamil: in the double-object alternant, the author proposes that the oblique argument is introduced by an applicative head which, furthermore, occurs low whereas in the to/for-PP structure, there is no such applicative head (Marantz:1993, Pylkkanen:2002). All observed asymmetries between the two alternants are shown to fall out naturally from this and related structural distinctions. |