Unaccusative Verbs in Romance Languages (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Languages and Cognition)

✍ Scribed by Ian MacKenzie

• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 243
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics regarding such matters as auxiliary selection, partitive cliticization, bare subjects, participle agreement, and more. For the past two decades the Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He here re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan, and concludes that it is essentially unmotivated. Alternative explanations are advanced, based on information structure, semantics and the impact on synchrony of diachronic change. The picture that emerges is one of a complex but interrelated set of causalities.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
List of Tables......Page 10
Acknowledgement......Page 11
Sources of Historical Examples......Page 12
1.1 The Ergative Analysis......Page 14
1.2 The Ergative Analysis versus the Unaccusative Hypothesis......Page 18
1.3 General problems with the ‘deep-object’ hypothesis......Page 21
1.4 Conclusion......Page 28
2.1 Introduction......Page 30
2.2 Expletives and unergative subjects......Page 31
2.3 Partitive case......Page 33
2.4 A preliminary conclusion about expletive inversion......Page 43
2.5 Distribution of French il......Page 44
2.6 Conclusion......Page 50
3.1 Introduction......Page 52
3.2 Syntactic arguments......Page 53
3.3 Partitive cliticization independent of unaccusative–unergative distinction......Page 68
3.4 The distribution of partitive ne/en......Page 73
3.5 Conclusion......Page 80
4.1 Introduction......Page 83
4.2 Unergatives can have bare postverbal subjects......Page 86
4.3 Constraints on bare subject distribution......Page 91
4.4 Aspectually stative constructions......Page 108
4.5 Modified and conjoined bare subjects......Page 112
4.6 Conclusion......Page 114
5.1 Introduction......Page 116
5.2 Burzio’s theory......Page 117
5.3 Accounts based on the nature of the auxiliaries......Page 122
5.4 Comparison between Italian and French......Page 124
5.5 Auxiliary selection is not directly semantic......Page 130
5.6 The historical perspective......Page 142
5.7 Conclusion......Page 172
6.1 The basic patterns......Page 175
6.2 Agreement by movement......Page 177
6.3 The problem of postverbal subjects......Page 178
6.4 Fragmentation of the system......Page 181
6.5 Conclusion......Page 183
7.1 The basic data......Page 185
7.2 Structural analyses of participial absolutes......Page 186
7.3 Unergative subjects in participial absolutes......Page 191
7.4 Conclusion......Page 193
8 Conclusion......Page 195
Notes......Page 200
References......Page 225
A......Page 233
C......Page 235
E......Page 236
I......Page 237
M......Page 238
P......Page 239
S......Page 241
U......Page 242
Z......Page 243