Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

744 Syntax of Dutch: nouns and noun phrases
Cornips (1997) have claimed that this is due to the fact that the intended meaning
can also be expressed by means of example (188b′).
(188) a. Marie gaf Jani het kind in dei armen.
Marie has Jan the child into the arms
‘Marie gave the child into Jan’s arms.’
b. *Jani kreeg het kind in dei armen gegeven.
Jan got the child in the arms given
b′. Jani kreeg het kind in dei armen.
Jan got the child in the arms
Perhaps one might argue that (188b′) is derived from (188b) by elision of the
semantically light participle gegeven ‘given’; see the next subsection for more
evidence for the semantic lightness of geven ‘to give’. If so, we may conclude that
this example is fully compatible with the claim that inalienable possessive subjects
are “underlying” indirect objects.
The dynamic verb krijgen has a more static counterpart, hebben, which also
allows inalienable possessive subjects; cf. (189). We may account for this by
assuming that the subjects in these examples are also “indirect” underlyingly. If this
suggestion is on the right track, this may lead to the conclusion that, alongside the
more familiar °unaccusative verbs, there is a set of “undative” verbs that take a goal
argument, but which are not able to assign dative case as a result of which the goal
argument must be realized as a nominative subject. An argument in favor of this
analysis is that verbs like hebben and krijgen cannot be passivized: this might be
due to the fact that they do not have an agentive argument.
(189) a. Jani heeft het kind in dei armen.
Jan got the child in the arms
b. Hiji had een hoed op zijni/ ? heti hoofd.
he had a hat on his/the head
c. Hiji had geen sokken aan zijni/ ? dei voeten.
he had no socks on his/the feet
If this analysis of the examples with krijgen and hebben is on the right track, we
may expect there to be more undative verbs: good candidates are the verbs nemen
‘to take’ and houden ‘to keep’; these verbs also seem to take subjects with a kind of
goal role, show an aspectual difference like krijgen and hebben, and resist
passivization.
(190) a. Jan neemt de boeken. a′. *De boeken worden genomen.
Jan takes the books the books are taken
b. Jan houdt de boeken. b′. *De boeken worden gehouden.
Jan keeps the books the books are kept
Furthermore, the examples in (191) show that the subjects of these verbs may
indeed function as inalienable possessors. However, there is a little snag: it seems
that the passive counterparts of these examples are better than those in (190), which
is also clear from the fact that they can readily be found on the internet. This means
that we can only maintain our claim if we assume that the verb nemen with a PP-