Applicatives in Ladino

Abstract

This thesis explores how non-core arguments are licensed in Ladino/Judeo Espanyol (JE), a minority language spoken in Turkey by the Sephardic Jews. The language has been in contact with Turkish since the settlement of the Jewish immigrants coming from Spain by the end of the XVth century. We studied low applicative structures in JE with a focus on possessor applicatives. According to our findings, JE does not license the applied arguments below the verb phrase layer except for some frozen expressions, hence the structure is more in line with high applicatives. When the language codes possession or recipients through applicatives, it is restricted to animates therefore it includes also the semantics of affectedness. Another phenomenon observed in JE is that in possessor applicatives the possessor is marked with dative and genitive case interchangeably. In our view this might be a linguistic change towards the merging of dative and genitive case in JE.