Agreement and the Icelandic Passive: A Smuggling Account

Abstract. There has been a long-standing debate in the literature about whether Mandarin has infinitival clauses. Since there is no verbal morphology to distinguish finite and nonfinite clauses, this is an open question. Researchers have used diagnostics such as the availability of an overt embedded subject and the interpretation of aspect markers to argue both for and against the presence of infinitival clauses in Mandarin. Using some of these diagnostics, in addition to the availability of partial control interpretations, Grano (2012Grano ( /2015 argues that the distinction between types of clauses in Mandarin is not based on finiteness, but rather based on whether there is restructuring: some complement clauses are vPs, while others are CPs. We provide new data based on the distribution and interpretation of the reflexive ziji, which suggests that there is a finite/nonfinite distinction. We argue for the existence of nonfinite control complements in Mandarin. Further, we evaluate the diagnostics used by previous researchers and illustrate that some of them are not reliable indicators of finiteness or of clause size.

This chapter provides an in-depth investigation of both inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation in agreement with nominative objects and ECM nominative subjects. We both build on previous observations and report the findings of recent fieldwork. We show that in addition to a general dative intervention effect, clause boundaries, expletives, and singular datives are interveners for some speakers. We propose that Icelandic ECM clauses are either TP or vP and that the number feature on datives is visible for some speakers, contra previous research.

This paper examines the acceptability of the double object and prepositional frames for ditransitives in Faroese. We build on previous literature which has discussed various factors which may influence speakers’ use of one frame over the other. We report the findings of a judgment study in which we examined the degree to which semantic properties of verbs and length of the indirect object affect speakers’ acceptability of each frame. Our findings suggest that verbal semantics affect the acceptability of the prepositional construction, but not the double object construction. Our findings, however, do not directly support a heavy-late effect, unlike what has been reported in previous literature on Faroese (most notably by Fiebig 2012).