THEORY: applicatives

> Is this like the English:
>
> Peter gave Paula a book. -> Peter presented Paula with
> a book.
Not really.  Applicative constructions are valence-increasing
devices that are generally multimorphemic.  The German example
that Joerg gave is slightly unhelpful, since "be-" also just
has plain causative functions which, of course, are also valency
increasing.  Here's a better example from Meskwaki:

  aSike:wa    'He is building a house'       (animate intransitive)
  aSikawe:wa  'He is building her a house'   (transitive animate)

  meSena:wa     'He is catching it'          (transitive inanimate)
  meSenamawe:wa 'He is catching it for her'  (transitive animate)

where the applicative suffix -aw- follows the incorporated noun
stem formant -ik 'house'  (cognate with the word borrowed from
another Algonquian language 'wigwam').  Note that one can directly
tell what has been promoted to object, because Algonquian stems
subcategorize for the animacy of absolutive argument of the verb
(either subject of intransitive or object of transitive).  Anyways,
'present' in English just happens to have the same (or similar)
argument structure that the German word 'beschenken' does, but
there is nothing about it that's particularly applicative.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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