Talk:dative of purpose

Request for deletion
The definition is wrong; this is just use of the dative to show purpose. I don't think it merits lexical coverage. --EncycloPetey 02:53, 14 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep — this and the other forms of the dative, ablative, genitive, &c. are useful to learners of Latin (like me); moreover, this phrase is idiomatic (e.g., this cannot mean, in Scots law, a “decree dative of purpose”). †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 12:45, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
 * There is always some context in which an utterance is interpreted. To start there is the context of what language is being spoken. Then there are culture, realm of discourse, conversation-specific context, and audience-specific context. If one is in a group of English-speaking students of linguistics who know what "dative" means, is this not obvious? Isn't it just the details of how one author of school of thought specify this that may vary in encyclopedic detail, not the one- or two-line definition? DCDuring TALK 18:47, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete or improve, it's not claiming to be idiomatic or context-specific, the article says it's a dative used to indicate purpose. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:56, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Is there a sense of "of" that means "used to show"? It's a phrasing that has always seemed very odd to me; the Latin dativus finalis seems significantly more SOP than its English calque. -- Visviva 12:25, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I had always understood these "X of Y" constructions to be fixed terms of art in classical studies. Certainly "dative of service" and "dative of (the) end" also exist, but looking at the very few b.g.c. hits for "dative of intent" and "dative of intention" is instructive -- all are more or less one-off references to constructs in modern languages (Malayalam in one case, Lithuanian in another, English in a third).
 * Also, if this is SOP, how is it that the "dative of goal" (or "terminal dative") is apparently not identical with the "dative of purpose"?  I'm not seeing the SOPness, so I have to go with keep for now. -- Visviva 12:25, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I've taken a quick look through one of the little Latin handbooks I own (one from Oxford Univ. Press) to see which "datives" it lists. It includes: "dative of advantage and disadvantage", "dative of separation", "'ethic' dative", "'polite' dative" (both with the single quotes), "dative of the agent", but not "dative of purpose" (although an entire section is devoted to expression of purpose).  Another of my little reference books has "dative of advantage and disadvantage", "dative of reference", "ethic dative", "dative of possessiion", "dative of agent", "dative of purpose", "predicative dative".  As you can see, only two of these match between the two references, one of them even adds a "the" or single quotes, thus showing that "X of Y" is not a fixed term.  There are certain collocations that are more commonly encountered, but their form and nomenclature are not fixed. --EncycloPetey 13:23, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Kept for no consensus.--Jusjih 02:34, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

dative of purpose
SOP. This is no dictionary material. --Fsojic (talk) 18:28, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It is part of a set of correlative terms: the types of dative cases. DCDuring TALK 22:44, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep. There are also dative of benefit, ethic dative, etc. — T AKASUGI Shinji (talk) 06:31, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 23:02, 24 August 2014 (UTC)


 * RFD kept per consensus; on the most pesimistic reading, no consensus for deletion after months elapsed. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:17, 30 August 2014 (UTC)