Volume 18, Issue 1

This article discusses some cases of partial agreement in colloquial European Portuguese, relating it with different patterns of word order in unmarked contexts. It is shown that postverbal subjects of unaccusative verbs may display partial agreement with the verb. It is proposed that postverbal subjects of unaccusative verbs are not necessarily assigned nominative Case. The contrast in behavior between subjects of intransitive verbs and subjects of unaccusative verbs provides evidence for the traditional claim that preverbal subjects in null-subject languages are in Spec,IP. This challenges recent proposals according to which preverbal subjects in null-subject languages are left-dislocated. An analysis for the difference between the behavior of the subject of unaccusative and intransitive verbs is proposed within the framework of Optimality Theory.

Unlike full noun phrases, weak and null pronouns typically cannot procrastinate: they cannot move at LF. Taking this as its starting point, this paper addresses the behaviour of English weak and null pronouns in three agreement domains: agreement attraction, agreement with committee -type noun phrases (here dubbed “pluringulars” when they trigger plural finite verb agreement), and agreement in there sentences. Agreement attraction is analysed in terms of LF-movement, which, in the light of the fact that they cannot LF-move, immediately accounts for the fact that weak pronouns cannot trigger attraction. “Pluringulars” are argued to be complex noun phrases headed by a null plural pronoun, which explains their failure to trigger attraction and a number of other properties of “pluringulars” which otherwise stand out as quirks, including the fact that they cannot be the associate of there in plural-agreeing there sentences. Agreement attraction also fails in there sentences, which is shown to supply an argument against expletive replacement.

A necessary condition for verbs in the locative inversion construction is proposed which is to be defined with reference to the event and qualia structures of verbs in the Generative Lexicon. The condition requires that the lexical representations for verbs include a headed subeventual structure designating a result state, the quale for which means that something is at some place. Unergative verbs, as well as unaccusative ones, meet the condition when they undergo the operation of co-composition with locative/directional phrases. Crucial evidence for the condition is provided by consideration of the Japanese counterpart to the English locative inversion construction, especially of the Japanese locative construction with unergative verbs, which necessitates the obligatory attachment to verbs of the affix representing a state.

The starting point of our investigation is the assumption that weak indefinite NPs have a well-formed denotation of type 〈e, t〉. This paper explores the consequences of this flexible type-theoretic approach at the compositional level. Some expressions (e.g., predicative be ) select for arguments of type 〈e, t〉. The combination of predicative NPs with stage-level predicates and other expressions which do not necessarily select for arguments of type 〈e, t〉 creates a type mismatch which can be solved by defining modes of composition other than function application. These closure operations are argued to be lexicalized in light verbs like have and intensional verbs like seek . They are grammaticalized in the existential there construction.