Unaccusative Verbs in Romance Languages

by MacKenzie, Ian

• ISBN13: 9781403949189
• ISBN10: 1403949182
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-08-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Ian Mackenzie is Senior Lecture in Spanish at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	ix
Acknowledgement	x
Sources of Historical Examples	xi
1 The Ergative Analysis and the Unaccusative Hypothesis	1	(16)
1.1 The Ergative Analysis	1	(4)
1.2 The Ergative Analysis versus the Unaccusative Hypothesis	5	(3)
1.3 General problems with the 'deep-object' hypothesis	8	(7)
1.4 Conclusion	15	(2)
2 Expletive Inversion	17	(22)
2.1 Introduction	17	(1)
2.2 Expletives and unergative subjects	18	(2)
2.3 Partitive case	20	(10)
2.4 A preliminary conclusion about expletive inversion	30	(1)
2.5 Distribution of French it	31	(6)
2.6 Conclusion	37	(2)
3 Partitive Cliticization	39	(31)
3.1 Introduction	39	(1)
3.2 Syntactic arguments	40	(15)
3.3 Partitive cliticization independent of unaccusative-unergative distinction	55	(5)
3.4 The distribution of partitive ne/en	60	(7)
3.5 Conclusion	67	(3)
4 Bare Subjects	70	(33)
4.1 Introduction	70	(3)
4.2 Unergatives can have bare postverbal subjects	73	(5)
4.3 Constraints on bare subject distribution	78	(17)
4.4 Aspectually stative constructions	95	(4)
4.5 Modified and conjoined bare subjects	99	(2)
4.6 Conclusion	101	(2)
5 Perfect Auxiliary Selection	103	(59)
5.1 Introduction	103	(1)
5.2 Burzio's theory	104	(5)
5.3 Accounts based on the nature of the auxiliaries	109	(2)
5.4 Comparison between Italian and French	111	(6)
5.5 Auxiliary selection is not directly semantic	117	(12)
5.6 The historical perspective	129	(30)
5.7 Conclusion	159	(3)
6 Past Participle Agreement	162	(10)
6.1 The basic patterns	162	(2)
6.2 Agreement by movement	164	(1)
6.3 The problem of postverbal subjects	165	(3)
6.4 Fragmentation of the system	168	(2)
6.5 Conclusion	170	(2)
7 Participial Absolutes	172	(10)
7.1 The basic data	172	(1)
7.2 Structural analyses of participial absolutes	173	(5)
7.3 Unergative subjects in participial absolutes	178	(2)
7.4 Conclusion	180	(2)
8 Conclusion	182	(5)
Notes	187	(25)
References	212	(8)
Index	220