Volume 30, Issue 3

This article concerns Verb-Object Constructions (VOCs) in Mandarin in comparison with the same type of constructions in Ewe. VOCs are verbs that necessarily take an overt object. Taking Essegbey's (1999) analysis of Ewe VOCs as starting point, I propose different criteria to classify VOCs in Mandarin and I provide evidence for the existence of four different classes. Then, by comparing VOCs in the two languages, I propose a syntactic analysis for each class of VOCs. Finally, I argue that Mandarin VOCs are the reflection of different stages of a lexicalization process that is not affecting Ewe VOCs. I conclude arguing that Ewe belongs to a more “analytical” stage than Mandarin.

The Bantu language Zulu has several types of predication in which no verb appears: adjectival and nominal predication, locative and possessive predication, and two types of existential predication. We show that these predication types differ from verbal predication in generally disallowing an internal subject (i.e., an unraised external argument), even in the case of nominal predication, which seemingly displays the unraised subject agreement pattern. Like Zeller (2010, 2011), we assume that the syntactic peculiarities of non-verbal predicates are attributable to the projection of PredP, whose head is morphologically realized in nominal predication. However, contra Zeller, we argue that PredP does not also project in certain verbal inversion constructions with internal subjects. The properties of these inversions are argued to be better captured by more general principles, such as the aboutness property of the preverbal subject position. Furthermore, only restricted projection of PredP captures the morphological alternation found in certain prefixes which follows the verbal/non-verbal dichotomy. It is argued that the existential predicate - khona , which has properties of both verbal and non-verbal predicates, is a special kind of verb, the only one on top of which PredP can project.

This article argues for the presumption that syntactic movement is involved inside the passive nominal (Anderson 1977, 1979, Chomsky 1970, 1981, 1986, Kayne 1984). I argue that pace Grimshaw (1990) and Williams (1982), there are some facts that follow only by assuming that the prenominal genitive DP originates from a noun's object position. Furthermore, basing my argument on Grimshaw's (2004) claim that Romance/Latinate suffixes license N's complements, whereas their Germanic counterparts cannot, I demonstrate that this dichotomy is observed in the formation of passive nominals as well. This in turn offers the basis for the movement of N's complements to the DP-initial position. The present study will thus reinforce the parallelism that has been purported in the generative literature to exist between the sentence and the noun phrase.

In a recent paper, Zeijlstra (2012) argues that the theory of agreement should be revised so that the direction of valuation would always be downward: the element that contributes the value (e.g. in the case of predicate-argument agreement in φ-features, the nominal) would be required to c-command the element that receives its value derivatively (e.g. the verb or tense/aspect/mood marker) – rather than the other way around, as standardly assumed. In this short reply, I wish to demonstrate that Zeijlstra's proposal is unsuitable as a theory of φ-agreement (i.e., of morpho-phonologically overt co-variance in φ-features between a finite verb or a tense/aspect/mood marker and a nominal argument). I survey two empirical domains, from Tsez and Basque, demonstrating this point; I then briefly discuss the consequences of these facts for the empirical domains that Zeijlstra examines.