The Affix-like Status of Certain Verbal Elements (original) (raw)
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Catalan Intransitive Verbs and Argument Realization
2018
The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of the single direct argument of intransitive verbs in Catalan, including its encoding as a grammatical function, verbal agreement, case assignment, and expression by means of clitics. Our main claim is that the single direct argument of a clause can be a nominative object. We show that the direct argument of intransitive verbs (whether unaccusative or unergative) alternates between subject and object. The proposed analysis diverges from standard versions of LFG, as it allows an external argument to map onto an object and allows a clause to lack a subject, in violation of the Subject Condition. We propose a new mapping theory in which case assignment plays a major role and account for the agreement facts by assuming a set of agreement features of the clause (AGR) that are identified with a grammatical function (GF), not necessarily the subject, by general constraints.
Revisiting -ej(ar) verbs in Catalan: Argument and event structure
Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 2022
We explore the properties of the Catalan verbalizing suffix-ej(ar), centering on intransitive verbs. After presenting the rich variety of outputs that this suffix allows, we focus on two generalizations. The first one has to do with the consistent eventive nature of verbs derived with this suffix, even from bases that count as individual-level predicates, like colour adjectives or proper names. Importantly, their eventivity is orthogonal to their dynamic/non-dynamic status. The second one is the robust unergative status of intransitive-ej(ar) vebs. We show that previous work on-ej(ar) has failed to capture these two properties. Adopting a Ramchandian, nanosyntactic perspective, we propose that this suffix is the spellout of the subeventive structure of a caused process, i.e., the heads Init and Proc. The (non-)dynamic interpretation of the verbs is claimed to emerge from interactions among the contents of the roots involved in the predicate, at the Isogloss 2022, 8(4)/12 Victor Acedo-Matellán & Elisabeth Gibert-Sotelo 2 conceptual, non-grammatical level. We finally extend the proposed analysis to account for the behaviour of transitive-ej(ar) verbs.
Catalan Verbal Compounds and the Syntax Morphology Competition
and I would like to thank the audiences there for their comments. I am especially indebted to Anna Bartra, Teresa Cabré, Jaume Mateu and Fabio Montermini for valuable suggestions and observations. Needless to say, all remaining errors are mine. This work has benefited from the grants HUM2006-13295-C02-02 from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science/FEDER and 2005SGR-00753 from Generalitat de Catlunya. 1 The nouns that form part of [NV] V compounds are typically inalienable possession nouns (IPNs). Some examples are cor ('heart'), pell ('skin'), cama ('leg') and coll ('neck'), the meaning of which can be used in transparent compounds (like those given in (1)) and can also be subject to sense extensions to incorporate a more figurative semantics, as illustrated in corferir heart+hurt ('to break somebody's heart'). Note, though, that this type of compounds can also involve nouns other than strictly IPNs like aigua ('water') and terra ('earth') in compounds like aiguabarrejar-se (water+mix+CL 'to have waters mix') and terratrémer (earth+shake 'to have the earth quake'). See Gavarró (1990: 78) for a proposal according to which strict IPNs and inanimate nouns like aigua and terra are unified under a Non-Distinctness Constraint. In her terms, 'The Non-Distinctness Constraint allows for lexical chains to be formed by nominals which have identical referents', which she illustrates with the following example in which the river and its water are clearly non-distinct (Gavarró 1990: 81). 2 See GF (1999: 246, 2000: 79) for a different view. They propose that the IPN is not an argument but a modifier of the complex predicate formed by the verb together with the possessor NP external to the complex verb. To illustrate the point, in alatrencar un ocell (wing+break a bird 'to break a bird's wing(s)'), trencar un ocell ('break a bird') would be the complex predicate that the IPN ala ('wing') modifies. A possible paraphrase could be 'to break the bird by the wing(s)'.
Abstract During the past 40 years research of causativity belonged to the central themes of the general and comparative resp. typological linguistics. In this respect it is astonishing, that in my opinion from the Slavic side this subject was treated if at all very marginally in the past. My interest was motivated by the fact that Causatives and Anti-Causatives require an analysis, which touches an interface of morphology, semantics, lexicon, word formation and syntax. Therefore it is also replicable by the Minimalistic Program (with the inclusion of Distributive Morphology). Furthermore, the theme comprises important observations concerning questions of affix ordering, syntactic structures and verb movement. Most syntactic accounts of affix ordering and verb movement follow the theory of incorporation by Mark Baker (1988). In this theory syntactic incorporation is assumed to be an instance of the general syntactic rule Move Alpha, e.g. a syntactic operation that derives morphologically complex words from morphologically basic elements (root, stems, or affixes) by head to head movement via incorporation. Whereas the traditional view on morphology and word formation is that word-formation takes place in lexicon, and that morphological rules are different in nature and apply on different primitive elements than syntactic rules, we shall try to advocate an analysis in which the phenomenon of Anti-Causatives and Causatives has to be derived from different ROOT-Semantics of verbs projecting different trees and syntactic structures by the operations AGREE and MERGE. The Causative Alternation (CAL) will serve as criteria to distinguish between externally and internally caused causation; with help of the CAL the Unaccusativity will be divided into two subgroups: alternating Unaccusative (AU-) verbs and non-alternating Unaccusative (NAU-) verbs. In the following an alternate distinction between AU- and NAU-verbs will be developed, namely the presence/absence of information about how the process to be treated was caused. The universal concept of the encyclopedic lexicon in English, German, Russian and Czech (partly also other European and non European languages) seems to assume four different ROOTS of verbs at base to classify the Anti-Causativity-Opposition: √ agentive (murder, assassinate,cut), √ internally caused (blossom, wilt, grow), √ externally caused (destroy, kill, slay) √cause unspecified (break, open,melt). Moreover, it will be shown that unergative/causative pairs depict an independent phenomenon, which does not affect considerations about CAL (correspondent to Alexiadou et al. 2006a, b, Kosta 2010, 2011; and Marantz 1997, but dissenting Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995 and Reinhart 2000). This talk is organized as follows: in section 1, I propose a formulation of the MP based on syntactic features; the examples will be taken from Causatives and Anti-Causatives that are derived by affixes (in Russian, Czech, Polish, German, English and some other languages of different types and origins) by head-to-head movement. In section 2, I review some basic facts in support of a syntactic approach to Merge of Causatives and Anti-Causatives, proposing that theta roles are also syntactic Features that merge functional affixes with their stems in a well-defined way. I first try to give some external evidence in showing that Causatives and Anti-Causatives obey a principle of thematic hierarchy early postulated in generative literature by Jackendoff (1972; 43), and later reformulated in terms of argument-structure-ordering principle by Grimshaw (1990:chapter 2). Crucial for my paper is the working hypothesis that every syntactic theory which tries to capture the data not only descriptively but also explanatively should descend from three levels of syntactic representation: a-structure where the relation between predicate and its arguments (and adjuncts) takes place, thematic structure where the theta-roles are assigned to their arguments, and event structure, which decides about the aspectual distribution and division of events.
L-Syntax of the AP and architecture of Spanish copulative constructions
VI EGG, 2013
Although the topic of estar has already been dealt with at great length in the literature, as one of the major subjects of analysis in Spanish grammar, a more accurate and precise account of its grammatical properties, regarding both structure and meaning, may yet be attained. In particular, besides being involved in a much studied complementary alternation with the copula ser, this verb can be said to be especially interesting for other reasons. In particular, over the past decades, grammarians and scholars have felt the need to explain the fact that clauses featuring estar (as only verb in the clause) essentially comprise two different constructions, briefly exemplified in (1). (1) a. Guillermo Moreno está furioso b. Guillermo Moreno está en Angola The general intuition behind this phenomenon is that these constructions involve two entirely different grammatical scenarios, if not two different verbs. However, the analysis can be simplified by addressing these constructions as alternative realizations of a same verb (copula). Moreover, the heads alternating as copular complement (AP, PP) can be deemed as semantically and syntactically alike if both (a)a lexical-syntactic decomposition is allowed and (b)we consent to regard attributive cases like (1a) as constructions encoding abstract places. The structural analogy ensues from lexical syntactic decomposition as AP are endowed with the same structural configuration than PPs since Hale&Keyser 1993. In fact, several studies support the consideration of the A as a non-primitive head resulting from the conflation of P+N (Mateu 2002, Jayaseelan 2007: ‘adjective’ is not one of the basic [i.e., primitive] categories of human languages). The same parallelism could be adopted for reading State and Place functions from sentential syntax, i.e., a copular structure would always contain a P(lace) structure realized either as P (or A). In short, the structures in (1) can be reduced to one: the P(lace) applying to L-syntactically ‘complex’ (derived) noneventive relational elements (AP) and to superficially ‘simple’ non-eventive relational elements (SP) as well. In addition, conceptual semantics also supports the analogy proposed. From a Jackendovian perspective, the Conceptual Structure assigned to (1a) can be argued to contain a relational element introducing an abstract Place (AT). In fact, this extension conforms to the Thematic Relations Hypothesis (Jackendoff 1983 inspired on Gruber 1965), according to which the same conceptual functions we use when dealing with physical space can also be applied to our conception of abstract space (e.g. : John is furious [the equivalent to ((1)a) would be ascribed with the conceptual structure [State BE [Thing John], [Place AT [Property furious]]]; cf. Jackendoff 1983:194 ). Thus, a formal analogy arises between As and Ps which can also be lined up with the syntactic structure assembled prelexically in the proposal of Hale&Keyser. In view of this, the question naturally arises of whether the same reasoning should be valid with respect to Spanish. Considering that it is generally assumed that the clause structure proposed for English copular clauses holds across languages, including Spanish, then there is no apparent reason to think that estar clauses in (1) —featuring AP and PP (as well as AdvP) complements— should not be comprised by the mainstream notion of copular clause. Moreover, the only restriction indicated is not connected with spatial PP complements; rather, our proposal is also vindicated by the observation that the only case that is generally not regarded as a copular sentence is that in which the copula is followed by a VP, “such as in John is coming here or John is to come here” (which are in fact expressions also involving estar in Spanish, as in Juan está viniendo, Juan está por venir, we may add) “since the verb be in these cases rather plays the role of an auxiliary or a modal respectively” (Moro 2007:18). On the other hand, the above-mentioned parallelism between physical and abstract spatial domains receives in turn further empirical support when considering the case of estar and the two kind of constructions yielded; thus, allowing us to regard them as the contrast between the primitive syntactic/conceptual relation and a derived syntactic/conceptual construction via conflation and abstraction, respectively. Thus, empirical motivation for the simplification initially suggested arises at a theoretical level. All in all, the simplification put forward in these subsections could be said to support our claim that the (apparently) different constructions yielded by estar can actually be seen as structurally alike at different grammatical levels.li Moreover, it could be shown to be not only empirically or theoretically supported, but actually welcome from a methodological perspective, since it offers a much more economical solution to the problem addressed in this paper. Further to this, a formal analogy also seems natural from a conceptual perspective, on the basis of the much studied parallelism between physical and abstract spatial domains.
The properties of the temporal Infinitive constructions in Catalan and Spanish
Probus, 1995
It is argued in Ms article that the temporal adjuncts constituted by an Infinitive verb preceded by a preposition in Catalan and Spanish have to be analyzed äs a PP whose complement is a CP. There are a number of reasons (for example, the postverbal subject, the expletive negation) to argue that the preposition heading the adjunct PP acts äs a temporal operator that licenses the Infinitive verb via incorporation. The possibility of a lexical subject allows us to conclude that although Tense in this construction is "weaker" than T in subjunctive clauses, the functional category Agr is strong and able to check nominative Case. Contrary to Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish do not have Infinitive morphological forms inflected with person and number. In this case, the verbal morphology is not transparent in Catalan and Spanish.
Verbs, Clauses and Constructions: Functional and Typological Approaches. Edited by Pilar Guerrero Medina, Roberto Torre Alonso and Raquel Vea Escarza. ISBN(13):978-1-5275-1667-0. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 129-148., 2018
Responding to a recommendation by , who suggested that [N + egin] V constructions of Basque needed in-depth study, the aim of this paper is to analyse these structures in detail. The reason to choose the ones formed by the verb egin is that they are the most productive and frequent locutions in Basque.
A syntactic approach to the Spanish 'al + infinitive' construction
Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2016
The paper seeks to study the way in which the interpretation is fixed in the Spanish AL + infinitive construction. The reading of these adjuncts can be temporal or causal. Some studies that have approached this issue previously (Rigau 1993; Alonso-Ovalle 2002) have attributed the interpretative disparity to purely semantic reasons, while others (Rigau 1995; Hernanz 1999; Martines 2000) have described the phenomenon without delving too deep in the syntactic details that influence the reading. The aim of this analysis is to approach the problem of the interpretation considering factors of syntactic order. I will claim that the reading is fixed depending basically on two factor: 1) the kind of topological relation that is established in each case: in temporal adjunction, the C head selects an IP as its ground; on the contrary, in the causal adjunction the ground is an XP, a projection between IP and CP that generates opacity with regard to the reading of the temporality; and 2) the ret...