Malefactives and benefactives. Two constructions with affected dative in Mexican Spanish

Abstract

Languages are distinguished, in typological terms, between those which have a specific grammatical

form to mark benefactive participants and a different form to code malefactives, and

those which do not differentiate those categories with specific marks. Spanish is usually classified

among this last type of languages (Smith, 2005; Radetzky & Smith, 2010: 99). It is argued

that this language has an affectation construction, the dative one, which can yield a positive

effect or, as well, a negative one. In this work, we present a semantic-syntactic analysis based

on usage data from Mexican Spanish that shows that the speakers tent, in frequency terms,

to use two different constructions for the codification of an affected participant: the agentive

and the eventive constructions. The first one shows a specialization on positive affectation

and the second one amply has a negative connotation. This suggests the necessity of properly

distinguishing between two subtypes of affected datives: the benefactive and the malefactive.

In this sense, it is possible to claim that Spanish belongs, at least partially, to the typological

class of languages that formally code the difference between those semantic roles