John Beavers 1 The Spanish Dative Alternation Revisited* JOHN BEAVERS and CHIYO NISHIDA The University of Texas at Austin We examine Spanish dative alternations, and argue that although there are parallels to English, Harley’s (2003) analysis of English cannot be extended to Spanish, contra Bleam (2001). We propose an alternative based on the Morphosyntactic Alignment Principle of Beavers (2006), wherein the thematic role of the dative argument is a truth conditional strengthening of the thematic role of the corresponding oblique, which follows from the dative vs. oblique case alternation. We support this analysis by showing that it accounts for a range of less-oft discussed Spanish dative/oblique alternations. We then subsume Harley’s phrase structural analysis of English and our case- based analysis of Spanish under a more general notion of relative morphosyntactic prominence, predicting both the similarities and differences between the languages. 0. Introduction We examine dative DP/PP alternations in Spanish, as in (1), where the PP a María “to Mary” in (1a) alternates with dative a María in (1b) doubled by the dative clitic le. We refer to the theme in (1) as the direct object (DO) and the dative in (1b) as the indirect object (IO). We refer to (1a) as the Prepositional Dative Construction (PDC) and (1b) as the Indirect Object Construction (IOC). This alternation corresponds to a semantic contrast: (1a) can have a caused motion reading but (1b) has only a caused possession reading. (1) a. Juan envió la carta a María. Juan sent the letter to María “Juan sent the letter to María.” b. Juan le i envió la carta a María i . Juan CL.dat.3SG sent the letter to María “Juan sent María the letter.” Due to similarities with the English glosses, many researchers (Demonte 1995, Bleam 2001, Cuervo 2002, 2003, de Pedro Munilla 2004, inter alia) have proposed that variants of the standard English shell analysis (Larson