French missing object constructions

This paper discusses a class of French à-infinitival constructions, where the missing direct object corresponds to an external argument, either being the antecedent noun in an attributive use, or else a raised argument in a subject or object predication or in the tough construction.  We investigate the internal and external properties of these constructions and show that (i) the construction displays passive-like properties and (ii) control and raising verbs may intervene between the marker à and the missing object verb, as shown on the basis of a corpus study. We observe that while the construction as a whole behaves like a passive where the erstwhile logical object ends up being promoted to external argument, the logical subject is still accessible for control, both from within the à-infinitive and from outside. Building on Grover (1995), we analyse these double subjects by way of a two-step passivisation, where the direct object valency is lexically promoted to subject without concomitant subject demotion. Raising of the missing object as a secondary subject will make it available on the marker à, which finally promotes it to external argument, thereby completing the passivisation effect. The present analysis thus captures the full set of à-infinitival missing object constructions in a unified fashion, capturing its passive-like properties and the extended domain of locality.

Copy raising as a lexical rule

The paper argues that there is compelling evidence for analyzing copy raising in English as a lexical rule that converts a subtype of perception verb with a stimulus subject (so-called “flip-perception” verbs) into a semantically bleached verb of mild evidentiary force, roughly equivalent to seem in some uses, which identifies the index of its external argument with the index of the pronominally expressed external argument of its complement.

Separation events in Tafi language and culture

Separation events differ in lexicalisation patterns (Talmy 2000) and in argument realisation (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2005) cross-linguistically. There are different types of separation events. “Cutting” and “breaking” events involve a non-reversible change in object integrity and have been systematically researched cross-linguistically in recent times (Guerssel et al 1985; Bohnemeyer 2008; Majid et al. 2008; Schaefer and Egbokhare 2012). In this paper, some of the generalisations that have been made concerning CUT and BREAK verbs are tested based on data from Tafi, a Ghana-Togo Mountain language. I investigate the morpho-syntactic properties of Tafi CUT and BREAK verbs in relation to a suggested generalisation by Guerssel et al. that BREAK verbs have a transitive/intransitive argument structure and participate in the causative/inchoative alternation; while CUT verbs are transitive and they are not expected to occur without their external argument. The types of events referred to by the CUT and BREAK verbs and the combinatorial capacity of the individual verbs are also explored. Based on an analysis of stimulus-elicitations and spontaneous language performances recorded in the field, I show that the Tafi verb bhui ‘cut’ can be used in an intransitive/resultative construction in which the theme, the internal argument, occurs as the subject. Drawing on the behaviour of bhui ‘cut’ I interrogate the explanations that have been offered in the literature with respect to such deviations from the generalisation. I argue that the verb argument alternation potential of a verb depends on the verb semantics as well as the type of (internal) argument it collocates with. Moreover, I explore the semantic interpretations of the verb when it combines with non-typical objects such as ‘water’. I show that such patterns and collocations such as ‘the water cut’ = ‘the water stopped running’, ‘cut a village’ = ‘establish a village’ are areal in nature (cf. Huttar et al. 2007).

Two types of alignment change in nominalizations

This paper investigates two instances of alignment change, both of which resulted from reanalysis of a nominalized embedded clause type, in which the external argument was marked with genitive case and the internal argument was focused. We show that a subject marked with genitive case in the early development of Austronesian languages became ergative-marked when object relative clauses in cleft constructions were reanalyzed as transitive root clauses. In contrast to this, the genitive case in Old Japanese nominalized clauses, marking an external argument, was extended to mark all subjects. This occurred after adnominal clauses were reanalyzed as root clauses. Japanese underwent one more step in order for genitive to be reanalyzed as nominative: the reanalysis of impersonal psych transitive constructions as intransitives. With these two case studies of Austronesian and Japanese, we show that reanalysis of nominalization goes in either direction, ergative or accusative, depending on the syntactic conditions involved in the reanalysis.

Agentive and non-agentive adjectival synthetic compounds in English

In this paper, it is argued that synthetic compounds based on the passive participle in English fall into two classes, depending on whether they possess the capacity to license modifiers pointing to the presence of the external argument. Compounds such as computer-generated, pencil-drawn or home-made are typically used as eventive and resultative participles, both of which are syntactically agentive. Compounds belonging to this group are contrasted with adjectives such as action-packed, family-oriented, work-related or adult-themed, which are shown to behave syntactically like underived adjectives, with no traces of the external argument. As such, they correspond to the class of stative participles.

Reanalyzing Mandarin V1-V2 resultative constructions—A force-theoretic approach

This study takes a force-theoretic approach to Mandarin V1-V2 resultative constructions. Unlike event-based analyses that hold a causing event accountable for a result state, this study attributes a result state to a specific entity involved in the relevant causing event. In this way, V1-V2 resultative construction (RC) sentences have the interpretation that through a causing action, one entity relevant to the action caused a change of state to another entity; this causal influence is reconceptualized as a force from the former entity, characterizing the situation change concerning the latter entity. Following Copley and Harley (2015), this conceptual reanalysis is represented structurally, successfully deriving V1-V2 RC sentences. V2 and the internal argument DP specify the property of a resultant situation and its holder, defining the force; the external argument DP tells about this force's source; V1 modifies this force, indicating the causing action through which this force is realized.

The categorial, argument structural and aspectual indeterminacy of past participles: A holistic approach

The present paper argues that all kinds of verbal and adjectival instantiations of past participles have a common core: a participial head associated with an argument structural effect, on the one hand, and an aspectual contribution, on the other. The former amounts to the suppression of an external argument (if present), which existentially binds the semantic role associated with this argument, and the latter renders simple event structures with change-of-state semantics (and only those) perfective. Based on these ingredients (and the contribution of the auxiliary have, if present), it is not just possible to account for how past participles elicit periphrastic passive as well as perfect configurations, but crucially also for their bare (i. e. auxiliaryless) occurrences in a range of distributions: stative passives, stative perfects, absolute clauses, pre- and postnominal occurrences, and adverbial clauses. These, in turn, differ in their properties on the basis of (a) the presence of a stativising PredP, (b) the availability of an adjectival head that triggers λ-abstraction of an internal argument, and (c) the complexity of the underlying verbal structure in terms of the availability of vP. This eventually allows for a ‘holistic’ approach to the flexibility of past participles that delineates a common core supplemented by distinct functional surroundings.

On the nature of arguments in event nominals

The present paper examines deverbal event nouns in Kaqchikel (Mayan) that consist of both nominal and verbal projections. Contrary to the recent proposal made by Imanishi (2020), who argues that nominalized verbs in Kaqchikel obligatorily lack an external argument projection, we demonstrate that intransitive unergative predicates maintain their external arguments under nominalization. We further propose that event -ik nouns in Kaqchikel are derived via predicative control with the verbal part being predicated of the possessor DP introduced in Spec,nP (in the spirit of Landau 2015). Additional support for this comes from the behavior of antipassive predicates under nominalization, which preserve the internal argument instead of the external one.

Mediating functions and the semantics of noun incorporation

Noun incorporation is commonly thought to avoid the weak compositionality of compounds because it involves conjunction of an argument noun with the incorporating verb. However, it is weakly compositional in two ways. First, the noun’s entity argument needs to be bound or saturated, but previous accounts fail to adequately ensure that it is. Second, non-arguments are often incorporated in many languages, and their thematic role is available for contextual selection.We show that these two weaknesses are actually linked. We focus on the Kiowa language, which generally bars objects from incorporation but allows non-arguments. We show that a mediating relation is required to semantically link the noun to the verb. Absent a relation, the noun’s entity argument is not saturated, and the entire expression is uninterpretable. The mediating relation for non-objects also assigns it a thematic role instead of a postposition. Speakers can choose this role freely, subject to independent constraints from the pragmatics, syntax, and semantics.Objects in Kiowa are in fact allowed to incorporate in certain environments, but we show that these all independently involve a mediating relation. The mediating relation for objects quantifies over the noun and links the noun+verb construction to the rest of the clause. The head that introduces this relation re-categorizes the verb in the syntactic derivation. Essentially, we demonstrate two distinct mechanisms for noun incorporation.Having derived the distribution of Kiowa, we apply the same relations to derive constraints on English complex verbs and synthetic compounds, which exhibit most of the same constraints as Kiowa noun incorporation. We also look at languages with routine object incorporation, and show how the transitivity of the verb depends on whether the "Equation missing" head introducing the external argument assigns case to the re-categorized verb.

(In)vulnerable inflected infinitives as complements to modals

The paper presents data from Galician and Romeyka which show that inflected infinitives do appear as non-attitude complements contra most existing accounts, more specifically as complements to modal and (some) volitional predicates that induce obligatory semantic control. Based on Landau’s (2015) argument that [+Agr] is irrelevant for non-attitude complements, it is argued that the phi-features on the inflected infinitives in non-attitude complements are redundant; in more technical terms, affixes expressing these features are dissociated morphemes, which are not interpreted at LF but are inserted at PF instead. For this reason, they crucially appear in monoclausal contexts, i.e., in complements to modals: in this context, in which the complement has no external argument (via lexical restructuring), these morphemes express a copy of a relevant subject Agr on the modal that is valued in syntax. From this also follows why they are vulnerable to change, essentially, because they contribute nothing.