Abstract. A longstanding claim in the literature holds that by phrases are special in the passive, receiving certain external argument roles that by phrases in nominals cannot, such as the role of experiencer. This paper challenges this long‐standing claim and shows that by phrases are not special in the passive: they can receive all of the θ‐roles that they can in verbal passives. They are banned from certain nominals for the same reason they are banned from certain VP types like unaccusatives and sporadic advancements: by phrases require the syntactic and semantic presence of an external argument. By phrases can receive a uniform analysis, whether they occur with verbs or in nominals. The analysis proposed here involves syntactic word formation, with syntactic heads effecting passivization and nominalization. It also relies on syntactic selection for selectional features and proposes a theory of such features. The conception of grammar that emerges is one without lexical rules, where passivization and nominalization take place in the syntax.
The phenomenon of ''frozen scope'' in double object and spray-load constructions is shown to hold robustly across contexts, constructions, and quantifier types. Nevertheless, frozen scope is not absolute, holding only between two objects but not between an object and a subject or an object and some other operator. The rigidity of two object quantifiers follows the pattern of multiple instances of movement crosslinguistically (multiple wh-movement, multiple A-scrambling, multiple object shift): movement paths cross, recreating the hierarchical order of the moving elements (Richards 1997). Hypothesizing that quantifier scope is derived by quantifier-specific syntactic movement, movement that is constrained in the same way as other types of movement, permits these phenomena to be unified under accounts of Relativized Minimality effects generally.
This article discusses three asymmetries in ditransitives—quantifier scope, nominalizations, and idioms—and argues that an asymmetric theory like that advocated by Marantz (1993) and Bruening (2001) is correct. A symmetric theory like that proposed by Harley (1997, 2002) cannot account for the asymmetries. The article also proposes a complete theory of idiom formation based on selection. It also proposes a formal semantics for double object constructions that includes a mechanism for composing complex predicates. This semantics can account for the different readings of again and other modifiers, and can also be extended to nonalternating verbs like deny, spare, envy, and cost, with correct predictions about their behavior.
The syntax literature has overwhelmingly adopted the view that Condition C reconstruction takes place in wh-chains for R-expressions contained within arguments, but not within adjuncts of fronted wh-phrases. At the same time, this empirical picture has been questioned by various authors. We undertake a series of grammaticality surveys using Amazon Mechanical Turk in an attempt to clarify the empirical picture regarding reconstruction for Binding Condition C. We find absolutely no evidence of an argument–adjunct distinction in reconstruction for Binding Condition C. Neither arguments nor adjuncts reconstruct for Condition C. We suggest that those speakers who report such a contrast (linguists, primarily) are following a pragmatic bias, and not Condition C. While we do not find reconstruction of dependents of fronted NPs for Binding Condition C, we do find reconstruction of fronted PPs. That is, the NP complement of a fronted P must reconstruct for Binding Condition C. The literature also finds reconstruction of NP complements of verbs and adjectives. This means that fronted Ns are special in not requiring reconstruction of their arguments and adjuncts. We suggest that, syntactically, arguments of Ns are treated as adjuncts: semantic arguments simply adjoin in the same manner as true adjuncts. Syntactic adjuncts can be left out of lower copies in chains, something that we suggest follows from a left-to-right syntactic derivation plus an economy condition on copying.
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