THE DATIVE IN MODERN ICELANDIC: EXPLORATION OF THE SEMANTIC GENOTYPE OF THE DATIVE IN NATURAL LANGUAGES*

This paper discusses distribution of the dative in Modern Icelandic. Similar to Latin, Modern Ice-landic exhibits occurrences of the possessive dative, i.e., the dative which marks the possessor of a noun. However, although Latin shows free occurrences of possessive datives, there is a syntactic re-striction imposed on the distribution of possessive datives in Modern Icelandic. The possessive dative in Modem Icelandic is limited within a PP which denotes the static position of an entity participating the semantics of the sentence. This difference between Latin and Modern Icelandic follows from the fact that the dative in Latin inherently possesses the locative semantics, while that in Modem Icelandic does not. 1