Attitude dative (dativus ethicus) as an interpersonal pragmatic marker in Latvian

1 Introduction

The dative is considered to be a case that can have very varied syntactic functions in a sentence, for instance, function as a direct and indirect object, indirect subject, adjunct, and among others, it can encode different semantic roles: possessor, destination, purpose, and beneficient (among others, Blake 1997, 144–51, Næss 2011, 572–80, Fernández and Etxepare 2013, xii–xv). One of the functions that is characteristic of the date is the attitude dative (term used by Haddad 2016, 2018, also the ethical dative or dativus ethicus, e.g., Berg-Olsen 2005, Givón 2013, De Knop and Mollica 2017, and the dative of affectedness, e.g., Niclot 2014). In this article, we prefer the term attitude dative, to highlight its semantic peculiarities and interpersonal character.

The attitude dative is an optional dative pronominal clitic that functions as an interpersonal pragmatic marker. It has an attitudinal and evaluative nature (e.g., Berg-Olsen 2005, 50, Franko and Huidobro 2008, Arsenijević 2013); i.e., first, it expresses the affectedness of the speaker or the addressee in a speech-act situation (1a), and second, it reflects the speaker’s opinion about entities and certain states of affairs (Niclot 2014), as in (1b).

Example (1a) expresses a strong suggestion that the addressee of the utterance would visit its author, while (1b) conveys the disbelief of the author of the utterance as regards its content.

As can be seen from examples (1a) and (1b), in Latvian, the attitude dative most often is expressed by the first- or second-person pronouns which indicate the inclusion of the participants in the speech act (e.g., Endzelīns and Mīlenbahs 1939, 134). Such personal pronouns are optional. The attitude dative in Latvian functions as a pronominal dative enclitic, i.e., in the flow of speech it is unstressed and sticks to the preceding word (for a more detailed account of clitics and their features, see Anderson 2005, 12), which is usually another personal pronoun in the nominative case. Attitude datives have therefore been often likened to modal particles because they share the same syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties (e.g., Kalnača 2007 as regards Latvian, Jouitteau, and Rezac 2008 in a broader typological context).

In general, optional personal dative pronouns seem to have an expressive function in various languages, e.g., Serbo-Croatian (Arsenijević 2013), German (Wegener 1989, De Knop and Mollica 2017), Italian (Niclot 2014), French (Jouitteau and Rezak 2008), Spanish (Franko and Huidobro 2008), Arabic (Haddad 2016, 2018), and Latvian (e.g., Berg-Olsen 2005) in that they express some affection of the speaker toward the fact or event described by the sentence (e.g., (1a) and (1b)). However, all this is expressed solely in a use-conditional way. It means that the presence of the personal dative does not alter the descriptive content of the sentence (Gutzmann 2019, 27). While ordinary propositions can be viewed as the set of words in which the propositional content expressed by a sentence is true, a use-conditional proposition is the set of contexts in which the sentence is felicitously used (Gutzmann 2019, 34). In terms of register, the attitude dative normally occurs in informal interaction (e.g., Berg-Olsen 2005, De Knop and Mollica 2017, Haddad 2016, 2018).

The attitude dative in Latvian, especially in a colloquial speech, despite it usually being mentioned in grammars and grammatical studies (e.g., Endzelīns and Mīlenbahs 1939, 134, Nītiņa and Grigorjevs 2013, 478, Kalnača and Lokmane 2021, 237), has not been analyzed neither semantically, nor syntactically. The only study that provides a brief overview of the cognitive use of the Latvian attitude dative was made by Berg-Olsen (2005, 50–1, 98–9). The present study mainly attempts to find out what meanings the attitude dative assigns to a sentence and what is the expression of this content in various syntactic constructions and utterance types.

The examples quoted are extracted from two corpora – The Balanced Corpus of the Modern Latvian LVK2018 (available at http://www.korpuss.lv/id/LVK2018) and The Latvian Web Corpus (lvTenTen) (Ten Ten Corpus Family, available at https://www.sketchengine.eu/lvtenten-latvian-corpus/). Since these corpora are not syntactically marked, it is not possible to distinguish between different dative constructions and to select the attitude dative forms of personal pronouns directly. Thus, a large number of attitude-dative examples have been excerpted from Latvian fiction, especially theatre plays, prose dialogues, as well as collected from everyday speech.

The article has the following structure: Section 2 contains a brief justification for the use of the term interpersonal pragmatic marker, Section 3 introduces three basic types of attitude datives in Latvian, Section 4 focuses on the distinction of the argument dative and the attitude dative, while in Section 5 syntactic constructions containing attitude datives are analyzed in relation to utterance types and speech acts.

2 Functional features of attitude dative

As Haddad (2018) points out, the attitude dative serves two broad functions:

1. an attitudinal function whereby a speaker expresses a stance toward the contents of the utterance;

2. a relational function in which case it is used to manage the relationship between the locators.

As regards relational function, the attitude dative expresses the speaker’s authority, personal interest, along with some emotional involvement in the situation (Endzelīns and Mīlenbahs 1939, 134, Berg-Olsen 2005, 99), as in (2):

It can be considered that the attitude dative expresses interpersonal relations, which reflect inclusive social connections, power relations, intimacy, roles, rights, and obligations (Haddad 2016, 2018).

At the same time, the attitude dative may be considered a pragmatic marker. According to Aijmer (2013, 4–14), the main functional features of pragmatic markers are as follows:

1. Pragmatic markers “mirror” the speaker’s mental processes.

2. Pragmatic markers organize the discourse.

3. Speakers use pragmatic markers with a rhetorical function to take up stances either agreeing or disagreeing with what is said. Thus, many of them have “an important stance-marking function,” and “they can express a large number of stances depending on the text type.”

4. Pragmatic markers may point to the roles, relationships, and rank of the speaker; e.g., they may reveal which of the interlocutors has a privileged role. “In comparison with other deictic elements, the pragmatic markers have a rich social meaning since they are used to indexically refer to a number of speech act features such as the speaker and the hearer, social identities and the speech event (social activity) itself.” (op. cit.)

Functions (3) and (4) mentioned by Aijmer essentially coincide with the characterization of the functions of the attitude dative given by Haddad. Moreover, Aijmer (2013, 12) states that “pragmatic markers do not have a fixed meaning, but a meaning potential.” This potential is realized differently in different situations of speech. They are difficult to analyze grammatically, and their literal meanings are ‘overridden’ by pragmatic functions involving the speaker’s relationship to the hearer, to the utterance, or the whole text (Aijmer 2002, 2).

The functional analysis of attitude datives is complicated as well; besides, the interpersonal and evaluative meanings that the attitude dative attributes to the statement depend on the personal pronoun, as well as on the syntactic construction and the type of speech act; therefore, each of these factors will be looked at separately.

3 Speaker-oriented vs hearer-oriented vs agent-oriented attitude dative

In Latvian, three basic types of attitude datives are attested as follows:

1. the speaker-oriented attitude dative expressed by the first person singular (man ‘to me’), less frequently – the first person plural (mums ‘to us’), and referring to the speaker (or the speaker and the hearer, or a group including the speaker).

2. the hearer-oriented attitude dative expressed by the second person singular (tev ‘to you’), less frequently – second person plural (jums ‘to you’), and referring to the hearer (or a group of hearers).

3. the agent-oriented attitude dative expressed by the third person singular (viņam ‘to him’, viņai ‘to her’), less frequently – third person plural (viņiem ‘to them (M)’, viņām ‘to them (F)’), and referring to an agent, or a group of agents.

4 Attitude dative vs argument dative

As mentioned earlier, the dative is the richest case in the Latvian language, as regards its functions and meanings. Syntactically, it can be both a verb argument naming an object, as in examples (10) and (11), and a dative-marked adjunct (12):

The dative can perform various semantic roles: the role of beneficient (dativus commodi) (10), maleficient (dativus incommodi), experiencer (11), and possessor (dativus possessivus) (12), to name the most important ones. However, these roles of the dative often overlap, for example, the roles of experiencer and possessor, as in (13):

A distinctive feature of the attitude dative is its use in structures where the verb valency requires no dative object (Givón 2013, De Knop and Mollica 2017). Thus, they are free (or loose) datives (or dative adjuncts), which are not part of the argument structure of the verb.

However, a phrase in the dative that does not belong to the valency frame of the verb can have the same syntactic pattern as structures with a valency-based dative object, which is an argument of the verb (De Knop and Mollica 2017, 2). Therefore, it is not always easy to distinguish between argument and adjunct constructions with datives.

It is also possible to trace the transition from argument dative to attitude dative in examples (14a) and (14b):

Here, the predicates piesiet ‘(here) to suggest, to imply, (lit.) to tie’ and zīmēt ‘to draw’ may be used with a dative object; thus, it would be expected that the datives are the arguments of the verb. However, the datives as unstressed clitics are placed between the subject and the predicate. Aijmer (2013, 16) argues that “pragmatic markers do not occur anywhere in the utterance or the turn, but there are rules for their placement which also have to do with their function.” In example (14a), there is also the evaluative particle te ‘now, here’, which suggests the function of the attitude dative. We may conclude that the attitudinal and evaluative functions of the dative are often emphasized by word order and particles, as in (15), where the attitude dative is placed between the subject and the predicate, and even two particles are used (gan ‘really’ and vēl ‘yet’):

Both the hearer- and agent-oriented attitude datives are often used to express threats in constructions involving the finite verb rādīt ‘to show’ and might therefore be interpreted as argument datives. However, when the transitive verb rādīt in these constructions is used alone, without the direct object, in a metaphorical meaning, these datives should be interpreted as the attitude datives, as in (16):

It should be noted that syntactically the constructions with rādīt are different from those analyzed earlier. In sentences with the hearer-oriented attitude dative (16a), the subject is the speaker, the predicate agrees with it, but the undesired (for the addresser) action, expressed in the infinitive, is performed by the addressee. In the case of the hearer-oriented attitude dative (16b), the undesired action is performed by a third person. The action itself is not always named and may be inferred from the context. These constructions are at least partly lexicalized formulae for expressing threats and will be described further in Section 5.2.

As the presence of the attitude dative does not alter the propositional content of the sentence, it should be assigned no semantic role. However, just as syntactically there can be degrees of transition between the argument dative and the attitude dative (namely, an adjunct), so the attitude dative may retain semantic role nuances, especially since there can be an overlap of the semantic roles of experiencer, possessor, and beneficient/maleficient, as in (17):

Interestingly, example (17) can be interpreted in two ways, dependent on the possessor of the footwear: if the speaker’s footwear is meant, the attitude dative man simultaneously expresses the roles of possessor and beneficient, if it belongs to the addressee, these semantic roles are not expressed (Wegener 1989, 71).

Nuances of the semantic roles of possessor and experiencer (18a) and those of maleficient and experiencer (18b) can be seen in the following utterances with the hearer-oriented dative:

Since the meanings expressed by the attitude dative are closely related to both certain syntactic constructions and speech acts, they will be described in more detail in the following section.

5 Speech acts and constructions

There are varied meanings of attitude datives in certain speech acts associated with specific syntactic constructions and utterance types. In addition, the attitude dative also has certain verb forms; the meanings and usage of which are discussed closer in this chapter.

6 Conclusions

The attitude dative is a dative pronominal clitic that functions as an interpersonal pragmatic marker. It serves two functions: (1) a stance-marking function, as it reflects the speaker’s opinion about states of affairs, and (2) a relational function as it points to the roles of interlocutors.

The attitude dative is an optional syntactic element, it is unstressed and has a fixed place in the sentence, namely between the subject and the predicate. Often its pragmatic functions are strengthened by a particle.

There are three types of attitude datives in Latvian as follows:

1. the speaker-oriented dative (1SG/PL pronoun);

2. the hearer-oriented dative (2SG/PL pronoun);

3. the agent-oriented dative (3SG/PL pronoun), which is the least frequent type in Latvian.

It is not always easy to distinguish between the attitude dative and the argument dative, as they can be used in similar syntactic constructions. The function of the attitude dative is indicated by the position in the sentence, the use of particles, the use of the predicate figuratively and without naming the direct object, as well as by the utterance type (most often directives). The attitude dative tends to be used in lexicalized syntactic constructions (set expressions) and may co-occur with specific lexemes and grammatical forms which perform certain pragmatic functions.

The attitude dative assumes particular functions are certain types of speech acts. In giving orders and, even more often, expressing prohibition and threats, the speaker makes the utterance categorical, thus attacking the addressee in a direct way (face-attacks him or her) and triggering a negative emotional reaction, at the same time bringing the attitude dative down to the domain of impoliteness. Exclamative utterances with the attitude dative may express disagreement, disappointment, and regret and are related to the domain of mirativity.

There are also other minor types of utterances with the attitude dative which lie outside the scope of this study.

Abbreviations

1, 2, 3

first, second, third person

ACC

accusative

ACT

active

AUX

auxiliary

COP

copula

DAT

dative

GEN

genitive

F

feminine

FUT

future

IMP

imperative

INF

infinitive

INS

instrumental

LOC

locative

M

masculine

NOM

nominative

PASS

passive

PL

plural

PREP

preposition

PRS

present

PST

past

PTCL

particle

PTCP

participle

SG

singular

VOC

voctive