Dativ, Bindung und Diathese

This study, derived from the author's habilitation thesis, develops the first unified and formally explicit theory of free datives in German. Traditional types of dative covered include the possessive dative, the dative of (in)convenience, and the dative of judgment. The central hypothesis of the book is: Every free dative binds the possessor of a co-argument of the same finite clause. Thus, the free dative is the exponent of a reflexivization diathesis that shares much in common with canonical reflexivity. However, in the case of the free dative diathesis, the dative argument is the antecedent (and not the subject), and the bound pronoun is always a possessor in the broader sense. The specific syntactic configuration associated with this binding relationship - the Rösslsprung binding - is recognized as privileged for the first time.