A major question for linguistic theory concerns how the structure of sentences relates to their meaning. There is broad agreement in the field that there is some regularity in the way that lexical semantics and syntax are related, so that thematic roles are predictably associated with particular syntactic positions. This book examines the syntax and semantics of possession sentences, which are infamous for appearing to diverge dramatically from this broadly regular pattern. On the one hand, possession sentences have too many meanings: in a given language, the construction used to express archetypal possessive meanings (such as personal ownership) is also often used to express other apparently unrelated notions (body parts, kinship relations, and many others). On the other hand, possession sentences have too many surface structures: languages differ markedly in the argument structures used to convey the same possessive meanings, with some employing a transitive verb HAVE, and others using a variety of constructions based around an intransitive verb BE. Examining and synthesizing ideas from the literature and drawing on data from many languages (including some understudied Quechua dialects), this book presents a novel way to understand the apparent irregularity of possession sentences while preserving existing explanations for the general cross-linguistic regularities we observe in argument structure.
We present an analysis of an understudied construction found in Philadelphian and Canadian English, and also in certain Vermont varieties. In this construction, the participle of certain verbs can appear along with a form of the verbbeand a DP complement, producing strings likeI’m done my homework,I’m finished my fries, and (in Vermont)I’m started the project. We show that the participle in the construction is an adjectival passive, not a perfect construction. We further argue that the internal argument DP in the construction is receiving Case from the adjectival heada, similar to what happens in all English dialects with the adjectiveworth, and that the internal argument is interpreted via a mechanism of complement coercion. The microparametric variation we find across English dialects with respect to the availability of this construction is accounted for by variation in the selectional restrictions on theahead.
Hyman (2000, 2002) and Kiparsky (2011) have noted that Mirror-Principle-violating morpheme orders often give rise to non-local morphophonological effects. Kiparsky (2011) explicitly argues that this generalization cannot be captured in syntactic approaches to morphology, such as Distributed Morphology. This chapter shows that the generalization can be explained via the combination of two pre-existing tenets of such theories. One is the idea that Vocabulary Insertion proceeds from the most deeply embedded constituent outwards (Bobaljik 2000; Halle and Marantz 1993). The other is the proposal that violations of the Mirror Principle are to be accounted for via phrasal movement of a category containing the lexical root ‘stranding’ one or more affixes (Koopman 2005; Buell 2005; i.a.). The possibility of non-local phonological effects arises because the movements involved in deriving Mirror-Principle-violating orders lead to a disconnect between linear distance from the root and temporal order of Vocabulary Insertion.
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