Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

(18) Sue bought a cake for Lou.
(19) Sue bought Lou a cake.
Although there is no distinct segmental morphology in English, nonetheless it is fairly
clear that the dative case-marked argument in (18), for Lou, can drop its preposition and
shift to a position immediately after the verb and before the patient as in (19). Building
on previous work by, among others, Pesetsky (1995), Pylkkänen (2002) differentiates a
number of different kinds of applicative on the basis of different syntactic criteria. The
most basic opposition drawn by Pylkkänen is between high applicatives and low
applicatives. The classic examples of applicatives from slightly older works are, as a rule,
high applicatives such as the following:
(20) Chichewa (Pylkkänen 2002, 18; Baker 1988, 354)
Maruto a-na-umb-ir-a inpeni mtsuko
PN Sp-Past-mold-Appl-Asp knife waterpot
Maruto molded the waterpot with a knife
Note that the instrumental adjunct, inpeni, “knife,” in (20) is a bare noun, whereas its
English translation, with a knife, is a prepositional phrase. Comparison with other
examples that lack the instrumental adjunct show the *-ir- morpheme indicates that the
knife is an instrument instead of, say, the patient. Pylkkänen then differentiates between
high applicatives such as (20) and two types of low applicative: low goal applicatives as
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