Resumen de Commitment datives

Olga Borik , Ismael Iván Teomiro García

• In this paper we argue for a division in the category of ethical datives by identifying a new type of dative: the commitment dative. These datives are clitics that appear in directive sentences, always refer to the speaker, have no effect on the at-issue content as they cannot be negated, passivized nor topicalized, cannot be doubled by a PP (unlike other kinds of ethical datives such as affected experiencers), allow for PCC violations, and are banned in (indirect speech/reporting) embedded clauses. Additionally, they do not introduce any participant of the event or any individual affected by the event, but they are used to strengthen the authority of the speaker. We claim that these datives are merged in the left periphery à la Krifka (2023), whence they can be interpreted at the syntax-pragmatics interface. More concretely, we defend commitment datives are merged in the commitment phrase, which can host two operators: the commitment-to-truth (Krifka 2023) that appears in assertions and the commitment-to-goal that appears in directive and commissive speech acts (based on Geurts 2019). The presence of the commitment dative reinforces the commitment-to-goal operator, which results in an increased authority of the speaker to issue the directive.