On the habitual verb pflegen in German. Its use, origin, and development

In this article, I examine the distributional properties, emergence conditions, and development of the habitual verbal head pflegen ‘use(d) to’ in the history of German. Synchronically, I argue that Present-day German possesses subject to subject raising verbs and that they can all be brought down to a common denominator: They allow promotion of the embedded subject into the matrix subject position (= A-movement). However, at the same time I argue that German subject to subject raising verbs differ and that their heterogeneity follows from their semantics. What all this boils down to is that German subject to subject raising verbs do not form a uniform class, neither semantically nor syntactically. As for pflegen, I account for its syntactic peculiarities referring to its functional status, i.e., the status of being a habitual head. Diachronically, I show that pflegen grammaticalized into an AspHAB-head in the transition from Old High German (750–1050) to Middle High German (1050–1350) and that this grammaticalization process restricted the way it behaves in Present-day German.

Ergativity in the Caucasus

This chapter provides an overview of ergativity-related phenomena in the languages of the Caucasus, a geographical region with a high concentration of ergative languages. The chapter reviews the morphologically ergative nature of the languages, revealed in case marking and gender agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian as well as person marking in Northwest Caucasian. No manifestation of syntactic ergativity is observed in languages of the Caucasus, with the exception of relativization in Circassian. It also reviews ergative splits observed in the Caucasus and describes attested patterns of split subject case marking in intransitive clauses. Finally, various properties usually thought to attest to the inherent or structural nature of ergative arguments are discussed: theta-relatedness, behavior in subject-to-subject raising, ability to participate in hierarchical agreement, the DP versus PP distinction, the structural locus of ergative case assignment, and some problems for configurational approaches to case assignment.

On children’s late acquisition of raising seem and control promise

The goal of this study is to address two questions: (i) whether the delays in the acquisition of subject-to-subject raising (StSR) seem and subject control (SC) promise are related, as would be predicted by various developmental accounts, and (ii) whether delays are due to limited processing capacity or immature grammatical abilities. Our two comprehension tasks reveal two groups of children: (i) a below-chance group; they have a non-adult grammar of StSR or SC, and processing capacity does not predict performance; and (ii) an at-/above-chance group: they have an adult-like grammar of StSR or SC, and processing capacity modulates performance. Importantly, we find no correlation between StSR and SC performance—some children have mastered StSR with seem but not SC with promise and some show the opposite pattern, suggesting a dissociation between the grammatical development of StSR and SC, specifically of the mechanisms required to circumvent intervention.

The Semantics of ‘Appear’ Words

In this initial chapter, the author establishes her framework for discussion of perceptual verbs like ‘look’, ‘see’, ‘seem’. Perceptual reports are particular speech acts made by utterances of sentences that contain a perceptual verb. More specifically, they are assertions made by utterances of these sentences. Perceptual reports assert how objects in the world and their perceptible property instances are perceived by subjects. A subset of these reports purport to assert how objects in the world and their visually perceptible property instances are visually perceived by subjects. This chapter is primarily concerned with the semantics of ‘seem’ and ‘look’, which—it is argued—subject-raising verbs. Subject-raising verbs function as intensional operators at the level of logical form, just like ‘it is possible’, ‘it was the case’, and ‘it might be the case’. The author’s main argument for the representational view rests on this fact about ‘seem’ and ‘look’.

THE FORMATION OF RAISING VERB ARGUMENT STRUCTURE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH

The paper is focused on studying the formation process of the argument structure of the raising verbs and, as a consequence, the establishment of the subject raising construction in the Early Modern English language. The emergence of studied verbs in the history of English is associated with the process of grammaticalization, when a verb with a full argument structure turns into a raising one-argument non-transitive verb that has no external argument and does not assign any theta-role to its internal argument; and subjectification, during which we observe the transition from the concrete semantic meaning of the verb to the abstract one. Restructuring of the argument environment of the raising verb is caused by the semantic bleaching of its meaning; as a result the Agent and the Cause are combined at the semantic structure level in the process of detransitivation. The Early Modern raising verb is a semantic and syntactic nucleus of the subject raising construction, which determines its main peculiarities.

Partial inversion in English

A typical finite clause in English has a single constituent that serves as subject. This constituent precedes the finite verb in non-inverted clauses like simple declarative clauses, follows the finite verb in inverted clauses like polar questions, agrees in person and number with the finite verb and with a tag subject when a tag is present, undergoes subject raising, and so on (Postal 2004). Five constructions violate these generalizations and in the literature have called into question the identity of the subject constituent. In each of these five constructions the finite verb agrees with a following constituent in a declarative clause despite the fact, among others, that the constituent preceding the verb exhibits subject behaviors of the kind identified by Keenan (1976). To the authors’ knowledge, despite intensive analysis of several of these patterns, the group as a whole has not been subject to prior study. The constructions are: Presentational Inversion (e.g., On the porch stood marble pillars), Presentational there (e.g., The earth was now dry, and there grew a tree in the middle of the earth, Deictic Inversion (e.g., Here comes the bus), Existential there (e.g., There’s a big problem here) and Reversed Specificational be (e.g., The only thing we’ve taken back recently are plants). The approach of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012) enables us to establish precisely what all five patterns have in common and what is particular to each, revealing that a constructional, constraint-based approach can extract the correct grammatical generalizations, not only in ‘core’ areas of a grammar, but also in the hard cases, where concepts such as subject, which readily handle the more tractable facts, fail to fit the facts at hand. We see further that the five split-subject patterns, sometimes identified as clausal, yield to a strictly lexical analysis.

On the grammaticalization of temporal–aspectual heads: The case of German versprechen ‘promise’

This chapter deals with the origin and the development of the functional use of the predicate versprechen ‘promise’ in the history of German. Synchronically, it illustrates that versprechen can be used in two different ways in Present-Day German: either as a lexical verbal head or as a functional verbal head. It also demonstrates to what extent these uses differ and accounts for where these differences come from. Diachronically, it shows that versprechen grammaticalized into a prospective aspect marker in Early New High German (1350–1650), and illustrates that grammaticalization is upward and leftward in the syntactic structure. Accordingly, it is argued that versprechen as a functional verbal head first started embedding DP complements and, as time went on, extended its usage to select infinitives as well, giving rise to a subject-to-subject raising analysis.