A NOTE ON APPLICATIVES

This chapter presents an analysis of Slovenian ditransitive sentences with the goal of contributing new data to the applicative research as well as examining the potential of the syntax-driven approach to the matter. Slovenian ditransitive sentences can be ambiguous between the low and the high applicative readings with the respective structures as proposed in Pylkkanen (2002). Some verbs, however, exclude the high applicative reading and have the low applicative interpretation only. First, this paper spells out the structures of ditransitive sentences in Slovenian, showing that the two different groups of ditransitive verbs do not emerge as a consequence of verbs appearing in different syntactic configurations. Second, in exploring a semantic solution to the problem, Rappaport Hovav and Levin's (2008) division of verbs with respect to the root semantics is followed. Verbs incapable of appearing in the high applicative structure are identified as belonging to the give-type group, their incompatibility with the high applicative being ascribed to the high applicative head's selectional requirement banning give-type roots in the complement VP. The proposal raises the question as to how much argument related semantics can be incorporated into syntactic heads and still maintain the view that argument structure is essentially regulated by the syntactic component. This study of a yet unobserved restriction in Slovenian ditransitive sentences is partially extended to Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian, testing the limits of a syntax-driven approach to argument structure.