Dative interveners

Current assumptions about syntactic structure give rise to certain paradoxes relating to ‘dative interveners’. It is argued that such paradoxes can be dissolved if the syntactic and semantic content of Merge is allowed to vary in the ways permitted in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and if the lexical heads concerned are given appropriate selection features relating to the modes of Merge. Two such solutions are offered, appropriate for seem and promise, respectively.