Active Existential in Lithuanian: Remarks on Burzio’s Generalization

Abstract

Evidence from the Lithuanian active existential construction shows that Lithuanian has a type of VoiceP that assigns structural accusative case in the absence of a syntactically projected implicit argument in SpecVoiceP. This construction is a violation of Burzio’s (1986) Generalization and its later versions (Marantz 1991; Kratzer 1994, 1996; Woolford 2003; McFadden 2004; Legate 2014; i.a.). This paper offers a revised version of Burzio’s Generalization by proposing that while accusative case must be assigned by a thematic Voice, the assignment of accusative case by Voice may vary independently from the selection of a specifier.

Impersonals, passives, and impersonal pronouns: Lessons from Lithuanian

“…Unaccusatives like ‘die’ and copular verbs like ‘be’ and ‘become’ are attested in the impersonal, as (58)–(60) show (see Spraunienė et al. 2015, Šereikaitė [to appear] for discussion).…”

“…The genitive of negation cannot be applied to objects marked with a nonstructural case, for example, the object of the verb ‘serve’ (E. F. Sigurðsson et al. 2018, Šereikaitė [to appear]). Such an object bears inherent dative and is not compatible with genitive:…”

Variable embedded agent in Sason Arabic

“…In fact, this is one of the reasons Legate (2014) postulates P, as such P makes it possible for the assignment of accusative case, by a thematic Voice. However, as mentioned above, Šereikaitė (2018, 2020) demonstrates that a thematic Voice head is sufficient for the assignment of accusative case and thus the assignment of accusative case by Voice may vary independently from the selection of a specifier, be it a DP or P. Moreover, the necessity of a specifier position for case assignment of another DP (cf.…”

“…This is because whenever the first sentence is uttered truthfully, there is no person that will sing in the wedding, thus the follow-up sentence conflicts with the meaning of the antecedent discourse.So far, the evidence points towards a view that the embedded agent is not projected despite the active VoiceP, thus SA MCs resemble the active existentials in Lithuanian. Šereikaitė (2020) demonstrates that in active existentials, illustrated in (83), the voice is active, the theme remains a grammatical object, and yet the embedded agent is not projected (see Šereikaitė 2018 for the diagnostics).Šereikaitė (2020) argues that the presence of a thematic Voice head is sufficient to count as active and license accusative case of the grammatical object in certain root clauses in Lithuanian. The embedded agent is not projected, but existentially closed at the Voice level, thus the label active existential.…”

“…Examples in (86) suggest that a potential analysis along the lines of Šereikaitė (2018), in which the embedded agent is existentially closed, like in the passive, cannot carry over to SA since that analysis would rule out the licensing of pronouns as well. Accordingly, I posit (following Heim 1982) that the embedded agent is present as a free variable, generated in the Voice head itself, 26 and bound by Voice-level or text-level Existential Closure.…”