Volume 47, Issue 3

This article investigates the distribution of intransitive predicates in French. It argues that within each individual construction, the constraints that govern predicate selection are determined by the necessary semantic compatibility between the participating predicates and the construction itself. This “local” analysis based on the lexical semantics of specific verbs and constructions contrasts with most previous accounts that follow the Unaccusative Hypothesis' claim that predicate distribution follows the specific structure of two distinct classes of intransitives. The local analysis is shown to be preferable to its structural counterpart to describe the behavior of intransitives in three constructions, namely: active impersonals, object raising in the context of the faire ‘make’ construction, and croire union. Because object raising and croire union are traditionally considered unaccusative diagnostics, the results obtained in this article raise serious questions about the validity of the Unaccusative Hypothesis for French, and suggests a possible alternative methodology to investigate the syntactic behavior of intransitive predicates.

In the face of problems with previous syntactic theories, this article establishes a new concept relating to the incidence of null thematic pronouns, focusing on null thematic subjects. The data indicate that, in rich agreement languages with null subjects, prima facie, recovery of such subjects is achieved first by reference to discrete agreement and, if this fails, by reference to an antecedent in context. Subsequently, preferred interpretations are resorted to and then overt pronouns. The argument is developed to show that every language has its point of morphological maximality. This is the maximum point up to which identifying subject verb agreement can occur in a language and this level of verbal agreement must be present for thematic subjects to be null. This point is scalar, being represented by morphology for gender, person and number in Tarifit, for person and number in Spanish, for person in Bengal and null morphology in Chinese. A further necessary feature for thematic null subjects to occur is that an antecedent in context completes their recovery. Whether this occurs or not is put down to the contextual weakness and strength of languages. This theory has the consequence that the licensing of thematic subjects is redundant and that null expletive subjects need to be treated as a separate empty category.

This study aims to make a contrastive investigation of the Thai and English transitive-based resultative constructions which consist of a causative predicate indicated by a transitive verb and a resultative predicate linguistically realized as a verb in Thai and an adjective in English. The resultative constructions which are the object of study in this article are those in which the causative predicate is manifested by two kinds of transitive verbs postulated in this article, namely, “implied-result verbs” and “entailed-result verbs”. This article examines one of the syntactic-semantic behavioral properties of both types of verb in both languages when they co-occur with resultative predicates. It is found in this article that English implied-result and entailed-result verbs are much more restricted in taking resultative predicates than the Thai counterparts. In other words, Thai resultative constructions are more productive than English ones. The productivity in the case of the former is attributed to the aspectual profile shift operating in serial verb constructions in Thai. Thai resultative constructions are arguably an instantiation of serial verb constructions. Resultative constructions in Thai allow both conventionalized as well as unconventionalized scenes to be expressed. In contrast, only conventionalized scenes can be expressed by resultative constructions in English.

Analysis of the alternation between impersonal reflexives and reflexive passives in Spanish shows that higher animacy makes an argument less marked as an object. This generalization supports Hopper and Thompson's (Transitivity in grammar and discourse, 1981) “transitivity hypothesis”, since it is entailed by their claim that objects tend to be highly individuated. The article proposes an optimality-theoretic implementation of the analysis, using a feature-based approach to argument realization modeled on Bresnan and Kanerva's (Linguistic Inquiry 20: 1–50, 1989) lexical mapping theory . The proposal highlights a contradiction between the transitivity hypothesis and the approaches to animacy that follow Silverstein's (Hierarchy of features and ergativity, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1976) analysis of split ergative languages, for which alternatives are suggested.

This article presents a psycholinguistically inspired approach to the syntax of clause-level coordination and coordinate ellipsis. It departs from the assumption that coordinations are structurally similar to so-called appropriateness repairs — an important type of self-repairs in spontaneous speech. Coordinate structures and appropriateness repairs can both be viewed as “update” constructions. Updating is defined as a special sentence production mode that efficiently revises or augments existing sentential structure in response to modifications in the speaker's communicative intention. This perspective is shown to offer an empirically satisfactory and theoretically parsimonious account of two prominent types of coordinate ellipsis, in particular “forward conjunction reduction” (FCR) and “gapping” (including “long-distance gapping” and “subgapping”). They are analyzed as different manifestations of “incremental updating” — efficient updating of only part of the existing sentential structure. Based on empirical data from Dutch and German, novel treatments are proposed for both types of clausal coordinate ellipsis. The coordination-as-updating perspective appears to explain some general properties of coordinate structure: the existence of the well-known “coordinate structure constraint”, and the attractiveness of three-dimensional representations of coordination. Moreover, two other forms of coordinate ellipsis — SGF (“subject gap in finite clauses with fronted verb”), and “backward conjunction reduction” (BCR) (also known as “right node raising” or RNR) — are shown to be incompatible with the notion of incremental updating. Alternative theoretical interpretations of these phenomena are proposed. The four types of clausal coordinate ellipsis — SGF, gapping, FCR and BCR — are argued to originate in four different stages of sentence production: Intending (i.e., preparing the communicative intention), conceptualization, grammatical encoding, and phonological encoding, respectively.

This article is a contribution to an emerging crosslinguistic typology of verb classifier systems. It presents an in-depth study of one particular type predominant in East Asian and Southeast Asian languages and epitomized through Kam (Dong), a Kam-Tai language spoken in Southwest China. In Kam and related languages there are basically two types of verb classifiers: sortal and mensural. Both kinds are involved with event-phase counting and temporal measuring and hence mirror the function of their twins in the nominal realm. Sortal verb classifiers can be characterized as deriving lexically from nouns that occupy an instrumental participation role. Kam exhibits ca. 40–50 of them. Although the term of noun and verb classifier has been around for many years, it is noteworthy that almost no scholar has ever come forward with an authoritative definition of what exactly constitutes a linguistic classificatory phenomenon. McGregor (Verb classification in Australian languages, Mouton de Gruyter, 2002) is an exception and his definition is based on distributional-probabilistic properties. I adopt, augment and partially rewrite his criteria and demonstrate that the system of sortal verb classifiers in Kam constitutes indeed a phenomenon by which verbs are categorized. The basic semantic requirement for classifiable verbs (or events) in Kam is to incorporate one minimal part. A minimal part of an event is defined as a touch -type event by which two objects meet in various ways. The prototypical verb referring to a touch -event is ‘hit’. Further subdivisions can be made for classifiable verbs. Verbs are categorized in terms of the instruments by which objects are caused to collide: by a physical instrument-object or by a trigger medium.

This article investigates how English-speaking children interpret imperfective and perfective participles used attributively in a prenominal position, as in ‘burning/burned candle’. These participles exhibit a pure aspectual distinction between ongoing and completion that is independent of the temporal entailments contributed by a finite verb. This article reports results from 45 children (1;6–6;8) who participated in an experiment investigating whether they know that the two types of adjectival participles are used to pick out different situations; namely, the imperfective participles map onto ongoing events and the perfective participles map onto completed events (Klein, On times and arguments, 2004). We found that the elimination of the tense-aspect interaction resulted in an improved results compared to those in Wagner (Journal of Child Language 29: 109–125, 2002). However, the results in this article as well as those from Wagner's (Journal of Child Language 29: 109–125, 2002) study of grammatical aspect morphology both find that children do not master the aspectual distinction before around age 5 when object-related information is given — in the absence of agency cues.

In most Indo-European languages, the direct perception of an event is represented by the construction [perceiver NP 1 + perception verb + perceived participant NP 2 + infinitive]. In Spanish and in French, the position of the perceived participant varies: it can be anteposed or postposed to the infinitive. This article examines the factors which determine the syntactic position of the perceived participant NP 2 . Based on a large corpus — containing about 4000 infinitival constructions — it is shown that, although at first sight Spanish and French prefer different basic word orders, a more universal conceptual parameter explains some striking analogies between the two languages, namely the modality of perception of the main verb. Quantitative research is used to demonstrate that due to the “objectival” character of visual perception, the internal structure of the infinitival complement after ver / voir and mirar / regarder is prototypically of non propositional nature, whereas the “eventive” character of auditory perception explains the propositional structure of the infinitival complement subordinated to oír / entendre and escuchar/écouter . These different internal structures explain word order in the infinitival complement.