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

: Among varied syntactic and semantic functions of the dative case in Latvian, the attitude dative or dativus ethicus is a less studied one. As an optional pronominal clitic, it serves two broad functions: ﬁ rst, it expresses the speaker ’ s authority and a ﬀ ectedness of the speaker or the addressee in a speech-act situation, and second, it expresses the speaker ’ s stance towards the contents of the utterance. In terms of register, the attitude dative normally occurs in informal interaction. The current study examines three basic types of attitude datives in Latvian and their functions in di ﬀ erent syntactic constructions and speech acts. The examples are extracted from corpora as well as Latvian ﬁ ction and everyday speech. It follows from the examples that the attitude dative has di ﬀ erent meanings in certain speech acts and syntactic constructions. The attitude dative is used in giving orders, expressing prohibition and threats, as well as showing disagreement, disappointment, and regret. The study suggests that the attitude dative tends to be used in lexicalized syntactic constructions (set expressions) including speci ﬁ c lexemes and grammatical forms, and its functions are emphasized with particles.


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, Naess 2011, 572-80, Fernández and Etxepare 2013. One of the functions that is characteristic of the date is the attitude dative (term used by Haddad 2016Haddad , 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).
(1) a. Tā ka tu man neaizmirstu PTCL you.NOM.SG 1SG.DAT not_forget.COND vasarā atbraukt! summer.LOC.SG.F visit.INF 'Make sure you don't forget to visit in the summer!' (G. Janovskis) As regards relational function, the attitude dative expresses the speaker's authority, personal interest, along with some emotional involvement in the situation (Endzelīns andMīlenbahs 1939, 134, Berg-Olsen 2005, 99), as in (2): (2) Tu esi pārāk viegli audzis, pārāk laimīgs tu esi bijis, vieglprāti, lai to saprastu Cik ilgi tu man studē? how long 2SG.NOM 1SG.DAT study.PRS.2SG 'You grew too easily, you have been too happy, light-headed you, to understand this. How long have you been studying?' (A. Eglītis) 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(Haddad , 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 frequentlythe 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 frequentlysecond 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 frequentlythird person plural (viņiem 'to them (M)', viņām 'to them (F)'), and referring to an agent, or a group of agents.

Speaker-oriented attitude dative
As mentioned earlier, a speaker who uses the speaker-oriented attitude dative marks him-or herself as a form of authority in relation to the hearer and/or the content of the utterance (Haddad 2016, 2018, also Berg-Olsen 2005, as in (3) In this case, the speaker construes himself as an authority responsible for the directive and qualified to give it (Haddad 2016(Haddad , 2018. The utterance would be grammatical without the personal pronoun man, but it is used by the speaker deliberately to emphasize his or her authority and to add a nuance of categoricalness to the imperative (Berg-Olsen 2005).
By using the attitude dative, the speaker states that she/he is also affected by what the hearer does; i.e., the speaker may also be characterized as an affectee, as in (4) and (5) Thus speaker-oriented attitude datives may function as perspectivizers that instruct the hearer to view the situation from a specific point of view (Verhagen 2010, Haddad 2018. The subject of the sentence and simultaneously the agent most frequently is the addressed person, as can be seen from examples (3)-(5), but in particular speech-act situations, it can also be someone who is absent (more on this in Sections 5.2 and 5.4).

Hearer-oriented attitude dative
It is mainly used to mark the hearer's involvement or engagement with the content of the utterance and/or with the speaker as an in-group member (Haddad 2018), as in examples (6) and (7) Again, the utterance (6) would be grammatical without the personal pronoun tev 'to you', which is used to emphasize the responsibility of the addressee for the negatively evaluated outcome, thus seeking to tarnish the addressee's reputation or suggest an imminent failure. The subject of the sentence most often is some third person that has been mentioned before, for instance, by a personal pronoun (6). Interestingly, in example (7), the subject is the speaker, and although the predicate grammatically agrees with the subject, semantically it expresses an action performed by the addressee (i.e., welcoming or sheltering of refugees). This very action has triggered a negative reaction on the part of the speaker.

Agent-oriented attitude dative
Although less frequently, it is also possible to use third-person pronouns as agent-oriented attitude datives in Latvian, as shown by dialogue from everyday speech (personal knowledge), as in (8) In this case, the referent of the third-person pronoun, namely, the cat, is the agent of the action, the speaker states his or her authority over it and, simultaneously, voices disappointment with the situation.
Another example from everyday speech is (9)a situation at the seaside. A boy does not obey his mother and does not wish to stop bathing. The mother repeatedly asks him to get out of the water, finally gets angry, and says (personal knowledge): The utterance is used as a threat and implies that the boy is likely to be punished. In addition, the boy perceives this utterance of his mother as a threat and therefore is likely to come out of the water at once.

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 andMollica 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) arts] stood up and continued in a loud voice, with all the severity he was capable of, "And now you will draw a crane!"' (A. Eglītis) 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) (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.
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.

Orders
The speaker-oriented attitude dative is mostly used in directive speech acts to assert the speaker's authority over the addressee. Such orders are very categorical, as in example (19)  'What a mess has been made of the façade… [There is paint spilt on the street.] You will wash the side-walk with soap!' (G. Priede) Thus, the orders only use the speaker-oriented dative in the singular, the subject of the sentence is the second person pronoun, either in the singular (19) or in the plural (20); the predicate is either in the imperative or the future indicative.

Prohibitions, refusals, and threats
Speech acts of prohibiting, refusing, and threatening involve syntactic constructions with both the speakeroriented and hearer-oriented attitude dative, less frequently with the agent-oriented attitude dative.
Prohibitions (21a) and threats (21b) are expressed by constructions including the speaker-oriented attitude dative in the singular, the second-person pronoun as the subject, and a negated imperative form (marked by prefix ne-) as the predicate: Just like in orders, the future indicative is also possible to express implicature that the possible action of the addressee of the utterance will most likely entail unpleasant consequences, as in example (22) If the predicate in the imperative is in an assertion, certain lexemes with the meaning of threat are used, e.g., pielūkot 'to look', (pie)sargāties 'to beware', as in examples (23a) and (23b) The predicate in the future tense explicitly names the possible unpleasant consequences, as in (24) (23) and (24), but also in the third-person form with the particle lai 'let', as in (25) Threats can also be expressed in the third person form in the future tense, as in (26) It should be pointed out that the subject in attitude dative constructions is usually a pronoun. This is significant, because in a construction with a third person predicate, as in (25) and (26), the addressee of the threat could also be named with a full lexical noun, but the pronoun is preferred.
The second type of constructions of refusal to do something (27a) or to express threats (27b) include the hearer-oriented attitude dative where the subject is the first person pronoun in the singular and the predicate is a verb in the first person in the future tense, as in examples (27) The speaker may refuse to do something by using a negated verb (as in (27a)), as well as a construction including a verb or verbs in an affirmative form with the particle gan 'really', as in (28): (28) Es tev gan gaidīšu! 1SG.NOM 2SG.DAT PTCL wait.FUT.1SG Kur tas ir redzēts! 'I am not going to wait [for you]! That is unheard of! (E. Vulfs) Example (28) carries strong overtones of dissatisfaction with the situation and possibly the previous speech act of the addressee.
As mentioned above, specific constructions with the lexeme rādīt 'to show' are often used to express threats with both the hearer-oriented (29) and agent-oriented (30) attitude datives: (29) Ko sadomājis? Kur līdīsi! Es tev rādīšu! 1SG.NOM 2SG.DAT show.FUT.1SG izpļaukājusi māte aizgrūž mani pie pumpja. 'What did you think? Where will you go! I'll show you!mother spanked me and pushes me toward the pump.' (LVK2018) The trend for such constructions to become lexicalized is demonstrated by the fact that there is also an elliptical construction without the verb rādīt 'to show', namely, es tev gan., that has turned into a set expression, used to express threats, as in (31): (31) .. es tev gan, 1SG.NOM 2SG.DAT PTCL kā likšu, tā necelsies, vai tu negribi pa aci? 'I will beat the living daylights out of you, you want your face to be messed up?' (LVTenTen) Therefore, threats can be expressed both by speaker-oriented, hearer-oriented, and also agent-oriented attitude dative constructions, and by the predicate in the imperative mood or in the future indicative. Constructions with specific lexemes tend to turn into set expressions.
In general, in directive speech acts expressing orders, prohibitions, refusals, and threats, the attitude dative may bring the utterance down to the semantic domain of impoliteness. According to Culpeper (2011, 19), impoliteness comes about when: 1) the speaker carries out a face-attack intentionally, or 2) the hearer perceives and/or constructs behavior as an intentional face-attacking. Thus, impoliteness depends not only on what is said but also on how it is perceived and how it relates to the situation. Besides impoliteness often involves seeks to damage and/or is damaging a person's identity or identities (Culpeper op. cit.,1) and likewise triggers a negative emotional reaction. However, the attitude dative should be considered as a marker of impoliteness only in such communicative situations where its use might be considered inappropriate and where it involves a clash with expectations (see Culpeper op. cit.,14). Such is the sentence in example (22), where the use of the attitude dative reveals a deliberately negative attitude against the addressee of the utterance who perceives such mode of expression are vulgar and very impolite.

Disagreement, disappointment, and regret
The speaker-oriented attitude dative is found in exclamative utterances expressing empathy towards someone and simultaneously showing regret about the situation, as in (32) Utterances with the hearer-oriented attitude dative are mostly used to express not only mirativity, but also disagreement with the opinion of the addressee (34a) or dissatisfaction with his or her behavior (34b): [berries and fruit] Tak netīs iekšā. Tie papīra maisiņi baigā nauda sanāk, un cilvēki jau nav gatavi maksāt." 'Other merchants, too, use plastic packaging: "Who is going to wrap [berries and fruit] in a newspaper? No way! The paper bags are quite costly, and people are not ready to cash out for them."' (https://www.lsm.lv/) The hearer-oriented attitude dative is found also in set expressions of disagreement and disappointment, e.g., kas tev daļas 'what's for you in it' or kur tev prāts 'where was your mind', as in (36) Thus, disagreement, disappointment and regret can be expressed both by exclamative utterances and by the speaker-oriented and hearer-oriented attitude datives. Some of them are formally interrogative sentences, so they also convey surprise and should be considered indirect speech acts. Here, as in the previous speech act groups, we find lexicalized expressions, including the attitude dative.

Irony
Some of the utterances with the speaker-oriented dative in first person plural in certain types of constructions express irony. These constructions always contain the particle jau 'already' and have a nominal predicate describing the subject of the sentence. The subject of the sentence, as in many of the examples above, can be a second person pronoun, if the addressee is being referred to, as in example (37) The subject can also be ironically referred to by a 3rd person pronoun, as in example (38) The use of the plural first person pronoun mums indicates that the opinion expressed is not only one by the speaker, but it also includes the opinion of a broader social group, thus providing, as it were, additional legitimation or social validation of the statement. Here, too, we find a partially lexicalized syntactic construction: 2SG/3SG pronoun + particle jau 'already' + the attitude dative 1PL + a nominal predicate.

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.
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.