Abstract
Allative is one of the three distinct spatial cases that Hittite is known to have used in the course of its written history, besides the locative and ablative. The allative ending was -a, and with the i-stems, we find the (-i)-ya ending.
At some instances, it is known to have been used in dative/locative function. This feature is confirmed for post-Old Hittite era, although the allative itself becomes moribund after the Old Hittite period.
The working hypotheses of this syntactic feature is that it is motivated phonologically: the dative/locative of i-stems was rather "unmarked", as the -i ending blended into the stem. That lead the speakers/writers to use the more overtly marked -iya even for dative-locative.
Whether the hypotheses can be proved or overruled by the textual evidence is the purpose of the presented contribution. An important argument in the discussion is the fact that there are indications that this feature actually appears to begin already in Old Hittite.
The research was based on textual examples of the Hittite corpus and their evaluation