How is the dative case for help being used here?

Question

Swiss-German has dative and accusative case-marking for its objects.

In the sentence "I gave him the book," "him" must be marked as dative and "the book" must be marked as accusative. It's clear that "him" is the indirect object since you can rewrite the sentence as "I gave to him the book."

But the verb "help" requires it's subject to have a dative case, which semantically makes sense since the object is the beneficiary of the action in the sentence. But syntactically, it seems to be of a different flavor, one which I don't understand with my rudimentary knowledge of generative syntax.

First of all, you can't rewrite "I helped Hans build the house" using "helped to Hans." Second, it looks like "help" is taking an independent clause as an argument with no explicit or even implicit complementizer, but the fact that "Hans" is marked (in Swiss German: "em Hans") makes it seem as though it is just taking "Hans" as an argument. Is there any discussion in generative syntax or elsewhere about this? Do you know of any references that might help me answer similar questions?

By the way, if you couldn't already tell, I started thinking about this because of this paper: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf

Answer 1

I think you are confusing English with German. In German (not just Swiss German, but all dialects, and standard German too) the verb helfen governs the dative case. In Old English helpen was similarly construed with the dative or genitive, but in modern English the historic dative and accusative have merged into a single case, generally called objective, illustrated by pronouns like me, him, her, us, them, whom. There is now no morphological distinction between a dative and an accusative case, but there is a syntactical distinction between a direct and an indirect object; this expresses itself in the fact that the indirect object can be paraphrased with the preposition “to”, while the direct object cannot, and also by word order. Thus we say “I gave him the book” or “I gave the book to him”, but we do not use “to” with a direct object. Similarly, we say “I helped him cook” but not “*I helped cook to him”. So why do you want to classify the object of “help” as dative?

Answer 2

There is the distinction between predictable dative and idiosyncratic dative, predictable dative being, for example, the dative in ditransitive constructions like "Ich gebe dem Hans das Buch" (I give the book to Hans) is predictable and the Dative in "Ich helfe dem Hans ein Haus zu bauen" (I help Hans to build a house) is idiosyncratic, i.e. somewhat irregularly assigned, even though Datives like this seem often to correspond to certain Theta roles (e.g. Experiencer or Benefactor, as opposed to Patient). I can refer you to this if you want to read up on the assignment of Datives.

Structurally, "Ich helfe dem Hans ein Haus zu bauen" ('I help the.DAT Hans a house to build') is an instance of raising or control, and 'ein Haus zu bauen' is an argument of 'helfe'. There even is a "complementizer", 'zu', although I think it is the head of T rather than C.