This blog is maintained by the team of Prof. Edgar Onea.
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In this talk I focus on a peculiar methodological conflict that exists in the Slavic syntactic literature and offer insights into what I believe stands behind it, as well as propose a possible resolution. Specifically, I show that insights into argument structure of ditransitive predicates due to diagnostics that rely on Information Structure on the one hand (i.e., Focus projection, intuitions of Discourse Neutrality) and quantifier scope on another (the Scope Freezing Diagnostic), are in direct clash with each other in that they point to opposite conclusions about what the underlying structure of ditransitive verbs must be. Applying the Scope Freezing Diagnostic to a wide variety of constructions, I point out a commonality, namely that according to this diagnostic, the internal argument that thematically is likely to realize the [+Animate] entity (e.g., Goal; Object Experiencer) is merged in the structurally lower position relative to its co-argument. Furthermore, I show that the overt syntactic raising of this low [+Animate] argument does not disrupt Focus projection and yields a linearization of arguments widely perceived to represent the more discourse neutral word order. This finding, then, explains the peculiar clash we observe between the diagnostics: the Scope Freezing diagnostic, being a first-phase syntax phenomenon, is sensitive to the basic Merge relations, whereas the Information Structure-based diagnostics, are not. Methodologically, this means that the IS-based tests must be supplemented with other, more precise diagnostics. Finally, I discuss the scope and limitations of the Scope Freezing Diagnostic