The expletive interpretation of the Ethical Dative: a syntactic approach to a non-argumental clitic

Abstract Natural languages contain elements that do not contribute to the propositional meaning of a sentence. Among these, certain forms, such as the Ethical Dative (ED), are less studied. The ED serves the specific function of identifying a person who is affected by the event described in a sentence. This is exemplified by the Italian sentence Tommaso mi ha camminato fino al parco da solo (literally, ‘Thomas ED has walked to the park alone’, meaning ‘Thomas walked to the park alone’). ED does not change the truth conditions associated with the sentence in which it occurs, thus being ‘expletive’/‘pleonastic’ in a sense, even though it adds an “affectedness” semantic property that would otherwise be absent. In this article, I argue that the interpretative nature of these expletive elements depends on their syntactic configuration. More specifically, I describe key aspects of ED and propose a syntactic analysis for it. I argue that this non-core/non-argumental dative is introduced as the head of an Applicative Phrase generated outside the thematic domain of the syntactic tree, in the Complementizer domain. This hypothesis accounts for its expletive nature as well as various other properties.