Polish impersonal middles with a dative as syntactically derived experience events

Abstract

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.

The dual face of structural object case: on Lithuanian genitive of negation

“…This construction differs from the Lithuanian construction in that it has a clitic się. Willim (2020) argues that this construction has a non-thematic Voice where się carries neither ϕ nor case features. However, Rivero (2003) argues that this clitic is in nominative case.…”