The modal side of the dative: From predicative possession to possessive modality

This chapter examines predicative possession (e.g., I have a book) in relation to possessive modality (e.g., I have to buy a book) (Bhatt 1997; Bjorkman & Cowper 2016).
Bjorkman & Cowper (2016) report that in Hindi-Urdu and Bengali (BE-languages),
possessive modality consistently correlates with the dative case, whereas predicative possession allows other obliques, namely genitive. They propose that both
predicative possession and possessive modality are reducible to an interpretable
feature encoding inclusion, [INCL], and suggest that the dative case is a morphosyntactic realization of [INCL] combined with a modal operator within a single syntactic head via featural composition. Focusing on Russian – another BE-language – I show that there are problems with this analysis. Russian data indicates that possessive modality in this language is to be derived from directional (vector-like)
semantics of the head that introduces the dative. I offer a unified account of the
dative used with an NP and the one used with a TP, assuming a single argument-introducing head, i* (Wood & Marantz 2017).