LINGUIST List review of: Events, Arguments, and Aspects (2014) (original) (raw)
As is stated in the preface, the publication of the present volume was preceded by a workshop on verbal semantics (Aarhus, Denmark, 1st October 2010). The book, containing nine contributions, is divided in two parts, "Verb meaning and argument structure" and "Aspect and aktionsart". However, this division appears to be somewhat formal, considering that many of the contributions are related, at least to some extent, to both domains.
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2015
verbs and their relationship to transitive ones, and also considers the active-inactive type of argument linking (3.4). Section 4 deals with further argument linking types for transitive verbs: the inverse type (4.1), the salience or voice type (4.2), the positional type (4.3), and the generalized case type (4.4), the latter comprising accusative, ergative and split systems, and the possibility of dative. Section 5 considers ways of marking special semantic classes of verbs lexically. Section 6 discusses how a third argument is integrated, and thus extends the typology of section 4. It deals with the semantic decomposition of ditransitive verbs (6.1) and general principles of constraining it (6.2), considers serial verb constructions and noun incorporation as argument-reducing operations (6.3), turns to constructions where the recipient is treated like the object of a transitive verb (6.4) or differently from the object of a transitive verb (6.5), and closes with a new look on the E...
Ergative Case and the Transitive Subject: a View From Nez Perce
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2010
Ergative case, the special case of transitive subjects, raises questions not only for the theory of case but also for theories of subjecthood and transitivity. This paper analyzes the case system of Nez Perce, a “three-way ergative” language, with an eye towards a formalization of the category of transitive subject. I show that it is object agreement that is determinative of transitivity, and hence of ergative case, in Nez Perce. I further show that the transitivity condition on ergative case must be cou- pled with a criterion of subjecthood that makes reference to participation in subject agreement, not just to origin in a high argument-structural position. These two results suggest a formalization of the transitive subject as that argument uniquely accessing both high and low agreement information, the former through its (agreement-derived) connection with T and the latter through its origin in the specifier of a head associ- ated with object agreement (v). In view of these findings, I argue that ergative case morphology should be analyzed not as the expression of a syntactic primitive but as the morphological spell-out of subject agreement and object agreement on a nominal.
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