iobj in German: which accusative object is obj and which is iobj? (original) (raw)

For German, iobj is only allowed when a verb takes two accusative objects. Unfortunately, neither the dependency guidelines for iobj in German nor the German UD guidelines specify which of the two accusative objects should be obj and which should be iobj ("In rare cases a verb may license two accusative objects and then the relation iobj will be used for one of them.").

The iobj page provides an example however:

• Die Nachrichten kosteten den Vorstandsvorsitzenden_iobj seinen Job_obj .
• The news cost the CEO_iobj his job_obj.

Verbs with double accusatives take one animate and one inanimate accusative object. The animate one comes first. For some of these verbs, passive constructions are possible, but only if the animate object becomes the subject (using an example from Eroms' German grammar, p. 1801/2):

• Er lehrte mich_acc die französische Sprache_acc. (He taught me_acc the French language_acc.)
• Ich wurde die französische Sprache_acc gelehrt. (I was taught the French language_acc.)
• *Die französische Sprache wurde mich gelehrt. (The French language was taught to me.)

However, speakers sometimes avoid double accusative constructions and instead use accusative-dative constructions, where it seems to be the animate object that is rendered in the dative case (at least in Eroms' examples on p. 1084, e.g.: "so kostete das dem Übeltäter_dat zwölf Solidi_acc" "so it cost the culprit_dat 12 solidi_acc").
And semantically similar verbs that I can think of use dative for the animate object and accusative for the inanimate one: "Er brachte mir_dat die französische Sprache_acc bei." (He taught me_dat the French language_acc.)

So, my question is: How do we decide which of the accusative objects gets obj status and which one gets iobj status? (Has this even been decided so far, or has it been done randomly?) And is this decision (and the reasoning behind it) already documented anywhere?

• Option A: The example sentence suggests that the animate object should be iobj. This would mirror the case (and thus dependency label) assignment in the dative+accusative structure illustrated above.
• Option B (in case the assignment so far was done randomly): One could also argue that the animate object should be higher up in the hierarchy (since it's animate and/or because it can become the subject of a passive construction) and thus get obj, while the inanimate object is relegated to iobj.

(Once the grew-match website is up again, I can check what the different German treebanks do in practice.)