The Balto-Slavic dative complement with the verb ‘to be’

ACTA LINGUISTICA LITHUANICA LI (2004), 45 - 48 The Balto-Slavic dative complement with the verb ‘to be’ WILLIAM R. SCHMALSTIEG Pennsylvania State University It is suggested in this paper that the dative complement with the verb ‘to be’ in Baltic and Slavic infinitival clauses ultimately goes back to the IE dative of purpose also attested in Old Indic and other IE languages. Holvoet (2004: 80 and passim) demonstrates that in such a Latvian sentence as: (1) Lagsim vinu ari Sodien būt mūsu viesim. ‘Let us ask him Acc to be our guest pat today as well’ the dative complement of būt ‘to be’ is etymologically more ancient than the possible use of an instrumental in syntactically similar clauses in Lithuanian (and Slavic). I propose that etymologically this Latvian construction reflects a subtype of the ‘double dative’ or ‘dative of purpose’. This sentence might then be interpreted as originally meaning ‘Let us ask him in order that (so that) he might become our guest today as well’. Let us consider some other examples which Holvoet offers: (John 1:12) ... 23wxev adroię ėšEouvotav TĖxva deco yevéoDau is translated into Old Church Slavic as: (2) ...dastoimoviasts čedomo bžiemo pat byti (Codex Marianus) ‘...to them gave he power to become the sons of God...” (King James version translation). Note that yevéoda ‘to become’ is translated by OCS byti which thereby retains the Indo- European meaning of the root *bhii- ‘to become, to come into existence, to begin to exist’. interpret the OCS construction also as a ‘double dative’ or ‘dative of purpose’ and an alternative translation of this might be ‘he gave them power in order that they might become sons of God’. Note also the Old Russian expression: (3) Ona Ze ucase syna svoego byti xristijanu which Holvoet (2004: 80), from whom I have the example, translates as: ‘She, however, taught her son Acc to be a Christian par’. I could understand this also as ‘She taught her son, so that he might become a Christian’. The double dative or dative of purpose is well represented in many Indo-European languages and according to Ambrazas (1981: 20-21) is a reflection of the double 46 | WILLIAM R. SCHMALSTIEG dative with verbal abstracts. Haudry (1977: 105) writes: „Le type indrūya patave (‘pour gu'Indra boive’) est constitué d'un substantif ordinaire (la plupart du temps, mais non obligatoirement, un nom personnel) et d'un nom verbal (nom d'action ou infinitif); le lien entre le premier et le second est celui d'un sujet a un prédicat: indraya patave.“ Concerning the Old Indic type vrtraya hdntave ‘pour tuer Vrtra’ Haudry writes (1977: 105-106): ,,...mémes constituants, le substantif ordinaire étant quelconque; le lien est celui d'un objet a un verbe transitif... Naturellement, cet exemple peut étre interprété hors contexte selon le type précédent ‘pour que Vrtra tue’: 'expression est donc ambigue.” Similar grammatical ambiguity exists in Lithuanian. Thus: (4) Jis nupirko liūtą karvéms ėsti formally could mean either: (4a) ‘He bought a lion to eat the cows DAT OF GOAL' or (4b) ‘He bought a lion for the cows DAT suBJ to eat.’ Likewise the sentence (5) Jis nuvedė Jong banginiui ėsti (5a) ‘He brought Jonah to eat the whale DAT OF GOAL’ or (5b) ‘He brought Jonah for the whale pAT sus to eat’. According to Prof. Vytautas Ambrazas in his letter of 1996-03-19 the ambiguity can only be resolved by context. Now a dative with an infinitive (Lith.) būti, (Latv.) būt, (Slavic) byti denoting ‘to become’ might be understood either as the subject or the complement. The original dative of purpose meaning is illustrated in sentences (1), (2) and (3) above and perhaps also in the further Latvian examples given by Holvoet (2004: 79): (6) kas aiskawe manni kristitam tapt ‘what doth hinder me Acc to be baptized DAT’, which I could understand as ‘what hinders me so that I might be baptized’ and (7) unwinsch pawehleja teem kristiteem tapt eeksch ta Kunga Wahrda ‘and he commanded them DAT to be baptized in the name of the Lord’ which I could interpret as ‘and he commanded that they should be baptized (in order to baptize them) in the name of the Lord’. THE DATIVE COMPLEMENT WITH ‘TO BE’ | 47 At some point the dative spread from the purpose clauses to become what Holvoet (2004: 77-78) terms ‘a syntactic default’ case in such sentences as Latv. (8) Patikami ir būt rakstniekam ‘It is pleasant to be a writer’ and (9) Valodas vini centas atrast cits cita vajakas vietas, kas tos piespieda būt uzmanigiem. ‘In their talk they attempted to discover each other’s weak spots, which compelled them Acc to be careful pat.’ Perhaps it is on the basis of just such sentences as (9) which can almost be interpreted as a purpose clause (‘that they might be careful, that they should be careful, in order for them to be careful’) which led to the spread of the etymological dative of purpose beyond its original semantic borders. It should further be remarked that the use of the instrumental in similar constructions in Lithuanian was roundly criticized by Jablonskis. Typically guardians of the language sup- port the retention of earlier norms, so we can assume that Jablonskis is encouraging an older syntactic construction. Pirockinas (1986: 193) gives a number of examples where Jablonskis corrects the instrumental to the dative, e.g.: (10) patariu būti atsargiais INSTR = atsargiems DAT ‘I advise (someone) to be careful’; (11) bet studentams reikia būti ir sveikais INSTR = sveikiems DAT ‘but students must be healthy too’; (12) Kareiviui nedera būti žiauriu INSTR = žiauriam DAT ‘It does not befit a soldier to be cruel’; (13) Didę viltį duoda noras geresniu INSTR tapti = geresniam DAT tapti “The wish to become better gives great hope’. The use of the predicative instrumental in Slavic is apparently not an Indo-European inheritance. Danylenko (2003: 44) quotes A. Potebnja who wrote that the predicative instrumental is one of the most characteristic features of the Slavic languages and is a relatively late phenomenon compared with the use of the second nominative. (Danylenko stresses the fact that Potebnja says that both cases were equal ‘ravnopravny’, not synony- mous.) Infact, however, Old Ukrainian texts show the use of the nominative case more frequently. Danylenko quotes from the Hypatian Chronicle: (14) asce bo byl perevozniks NOM SG kyj NOM SG ‘If Kyi had been a ferry-boat operator...”; (15) uJaropolka Zena grékin(i) Nom sG bė i bjase byla ¢erniceju INSTR SG ‘Jaropolk’s wife was a Greek and she had been a nun’ (Danylenko 2003: 40). 48 | WILLIAM R. SCHMALSTIEG I am certainly willing to believe that the instrumental here is an innovation, particularly since this function seems to be limited to Balto-Slavic. Danylenko agrees with Potebnja who saw the use of the nominative in predicate position as being more archaic than the use of the instrumental. Itseems to me that any syntactic function must have its origin in a semantic function. The original semantic function of the dative of purpose was, however, sometimes lost and the dative became the automatic complement with the verb ‘to be’. Thus Holvoet's conclu- sion that the Latvian dative is more original than a Baltic or Slavic instrumental in similar constructions is completely credible. REFERENCES AMBRAZAS, V. 1981: Zur Geschichte einer indoeuropaischen Konstruktion: Dativus cum Infinitivo im Baltischen. Kalbotyra 33 (3), 12-24. JAGič, V., ed., 1960: Codex Marianus glagoliticus, Graz: Institut fir Slavistik der Universitat Graz. DANYLENKO, A. I. 2003: Predykaty, vidminky i diatezy v ukrajinks’kij movi: istoricnyj i typolohic¢nyj aspekty, Xarkiv: Oko. HAUDRY, J. 1977: L’emploi des cas en védique, Lyon: Editions L Hermės. HorvoET, A. 2004: On the marking of predicate nominals in Baltic, in Baldi, Ph. and Dini, P. U., eds., 2004. Studies in Baltic and Indo-European linguistics in honor of William R. Schmalstieg (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 254), Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 75-90. PIROCKINAS, A. 1986: Jono Jablonskio kalbos taisymai, Kaunas: Šviesa. William R. Schmalstieg Gauta 2005 01 11 814 Cornwall Road State College, PA 16803, USA