A comparative view of the requirement for adverbial modification in middles

Lekakou, Marika

doi:10.1075/la.96.09lek

Cited by 26 publications

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“…In other words, Voice expletive is semantically vacuous (i.e., it denotes the identity function; see also Wood 2015;Wood & Marantz 2017), and Schäfer argues that a reflexive pronoun, due to its referential defectiveness, is the only element that can legitimately occupy this non-thematic argument position. Turning to PM in (23c), Schäfer proposes that just as in the case of (marked) anticausatives, the structural subject is interpreted as the Theme, and is consequently basegenerated as the internal argument (pace Fagan 1992;A & S 1994;1995;2006;Lekakou 2005a;2005b). Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that although an Agent is implied in PM, its status is quite different from the status of the implicit Agent of passives.…”

Section: The Syntax Of Pm In German (And Dutch)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In lexicalist frameworks, this difference has often been captured by a presyntactic middle-forming operation that blocks the Agent from projecting into the syntax (see e.g. Fagan 1992;A&S 1994;1995;2006;Lekakou 2005a;b; among others; also section 3.1). In Schäfer's analysis, the lack of a syntactic Agent in PM follows from the assumption that PM, like marked anticausatives, involve expletive Voice, which does not encode agentivity, and thus blocks the projection of a (potential) thematic external argument.…”

Section: (24)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cardinaletti (1990) develops an account of IM that differs from the analysis by Haider in treating the pronoun as the overt realization of arbitrary pro, which functions as the external argument. The generic interpretation of middles follows for her from the external argument receiving arbitrary reference (see also Fagan 1992;A&S 1994;1995;2006;Steinbach 2002 for different implementations of this idea). Cardinaletti's account crucially relies on an alleged difference between PM and IM: whereas the external argument is not syntactically active in the former, it is syntactically projected -as arbitrary pro/ es 'it' -in the latter.…”

Section: (31)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…it sits easily on this chair 'One sits comfortably in this chair.' Dutch respectively), on which most research has focused (among others, see Fagan 1992;Hoekstra & Roberts 1993;Ackema & Schoorlemmer 1994;2006;Steinbach 2002;Lekakou 2005a;Pitteroff 2014;Broekhuis & Corver 2015). PM feature a referential DP in subject position and are based on a transitive verb (or, more neutrally, a verb with a transitive variant).…”

Section: Introduction: (Im)personal Middlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PM feature a referential DP in subject position and are based on a transitive verb (or, more neutrally, a verb with a transitive variant). PMs also feature a manner/evaluative adverb (though see Lekakou 2005a;2006 and references therein for discussion of cases where the manner/evaluative adverb seems to be missing). No additional modifier is required.…”

Section: Introduction: (Im)personal Middlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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This is personal: Impersonal middles as disposition ascriptions

Lekakou

Pitteroff

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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We develop an analysis of impersonal middles which capitalizes on the observed similarities between personal and impersonal middles, and on Lekakou's (2004;2005a) treatment of the former as disposition ascriptions. The following questions are addressed: (i) What is the disposition ascribed to in impersonal middles? (ii) What is the function of the obligatory subject pronoun? (iii) Why is a modifier needed, in addition to the manner/evaluative adverbial? By having a closer look at what types of additional modifiers are acceptable in impersonal middles, it is argued that the disposition in impersonal middles is ascribed to an event(uality), rather than an event participant. This is done via the non-omissible it-type pronoun that functions as the syntactic subject of the clause. We argue that this pronoun in impersonal middles is also the semantic subject, and that it indirectly refers to the event denoted by the verbal predicate, via an association relation with the vP. Impersonal middles, then, are not truly impersonal: they, too, feature a referential subject. The only difference between personal and impersonal middles relates to what the dispositional subject is: an event participant, or the event proper. We also show that the additional modifier is required for pragmatic reasons, namely in order to restrict the generalization made by the generic operator present in impersonal middles.

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Section: The Syntax Of Pm In German (And Dutch)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: (24)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: (31)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: (Im)personal Middlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction: (Im)personal Middlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

This is personal: Impersonal middles as disposition ascriptions

Lekakou

Pitteroff

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Middles

Ackema

Schoorlemmer

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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This chapter provides an overview of the properties of a particular type of diathesis alternation known as the middle . The most salient property of a middle is that the internal argument of the verb appears as the subject of the construction, as in a passive. The semantics of a middle differs from that of passives in that middles cannot be episodic, but are generic statements about the subject. In the first part of the chapter, middles are compared with a number of other diathesis alternations that are similar in their structure and/or semantics. This comparison teases out the properties that set middles apart as a distinct category. It is shown that two different types of middle should be distinguished. In one type, the middle is parasitic on a passive construction in the language; in the other type, the verb retains its active form. In the second part of the chapter, possible analyses of the middle are discussed. Two distinct types of analysis are discussed, one in which the rules linking argument structure to syntactic positions allow for some flexibility, and one in which the middle results from a purely syntactic derivation.

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Polish impersonal middles with a dative as syntactically derived experience events

Willim

2020

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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Polish episodic impersonals featuring a (transitive) agentive verb in the imperfective aspect, an overt dative argument understood to be (coreferential with) the Agent of the activity event denoted by VP, an adverb like łatwo ‘easily’ or a PP like z przyjemnością ‘with pleasure’ and the (formally) reflexive się ‘SE’, are argued here to be impersonal middles expressing experiential evaluation of specific VP-events. The property of the VP-event expressed with the evaluative adverbial is parametrized to the dative argument, an Experiencer, which is added to VP by an applicative head together with the adverbial. The Agent is not present, as the experience event that arises when the applicative head adds an Experiencer to an agentive VP cannot license agentive Voice. The absence of the Agent is encoded with się ‘SE’, a lexical A-expletive devoid of φ-features and the feature of case in the specifier of a null non-thematic middle voice head. Polish episodic impersonals with a dative Experiencer provide evidence that evaluative impersonal middles need not be generic and stative and that they need not be based on unergative verbs. Accusative case is assigned to the verb’s internal argument in violation of Burzio’s Generalization (BG), showing that BG is not a syntactic universal.

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A comparative view of the requirement for adverbial modification in middles

Cited by 26 publications

References 0 publications

This is personal: Impersonal middles as disposition ascriptions

This is personal: Impersonal middles as disposition ascriptions

Middles

Polish impersonal middles with a dative as syntactically derived experience events

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