The history of English passive get is examined, in an attempt to determine both the diachronic pathway of development and the linguistic mechanism of syntactic change. Passive get (as in He got arrested) is shown to have developed from inchoative get (He got sick), and not from causative get (He got himself arrested). Passive get arose in cases where inchoative get took an adjectival passive participle as complement and where viewpoint aspect was perfective. Perfective aspect, which yields a bounded-event reading, encouraged the reanalysis of the adjectival passive participle as a verbal passive participle. Though the pathway of change is the same as that identified by Gronemeyer (1999), the mechanism of change proposed here is novel. The theoretical import of the article is to show how semantic and pragmatic factors like aspect influence morphosyntactic reanalysis, and thereby to raise our expectations about what constitutes a plausible reanalysis and improve our understanding of syntactic change more generally.
I adapt the dynamic framework for vagueness of Barker 2002 to the analysis of subjective taste predicates. I argue, following Kennedy 2013, that there are two qualitatively distinct types of subjectivity in natural language, which I call mapping subjectivity and (vague) standards subjectivity, and that the matrix predicate find is sensitive to the distinction between them. Novel to the present analysis is the proposal that find requires not just a complement that supports mapping subjectivity, but also a context that supports nonvacuous entailments about those scalar mappings. I part ways from Kennedy and from Barker 2013 in treating mapping subjectivity as a fact of the world, unassimilable to the metalinguistic variety of subjectivity associated with vague standards.
I examine the behavior of rare and other frequency adjectives in the tough -construction (TC). Due to the effects of a heretofore overlooked semantic selectional restriction, such adjectives have not generally been recognized as grammatical in the TC. I show here that they do occur grammatically in this construction when the relevant selectional restriction is satisfied. Specifically, as it does in non-TC sentences, rare in the TC requires that its subject be kind-denoting, a requirement not imposed on the embedded-clause gap position whose reference the TC matrix subject controls. In this, TCs with rare exemplify a previously unattested selectional and thematic asymmetry in the construction. On their face, the facts appear to argue strongly in favor of treating the rare -TC matrix subject as a thematic argument of the TC matrix predicate, an intriguing and challenging prospect given the fact that such an analysis has been roundly (though not universally) rejected for canonical TCs. Instead, I take the prima facie counterintuitive position that the rare -TC matrix subject is not a thematic argument of the TC matrix predicate; I argue that rare -TCs are thematically and syntactically identical to canonical TCs in this respect. I propose that the kind-denotation requirement for rare -TC matrix subjects is imposed indirectly, through the interaction of a selectional restriction on the infinitival argument of rare and the Agree calculus (Chomsky 2000, 2001) that identifies the TC matrix subject with the embedded gap position whose reference it controls (Rezac 2004, 2006). Beyond its contribution to our theoretical understanding of the perennially thorny TC, the present study constitutes, to the best of my knowledge, the first detailed empirical investigation of the behavior of adjectives like rare in the TC.
I investigate the syntax and semantics of a previously unexamined English adjective construction, exemplified by sentences like Middlemarch is a long book to assign. The construction, which I call the nominal attributive-with-infinitive construction (nominal AIC), is of interest for the semantics of gradability and modality. I argue that the major interpretive characteristic of the nominal AIC -the interpretation of inappropriateness associated with it -arises from the interaction between the positive degree operator associated with the gradable adjective and the modality of the infinitival relative clause, which contributes to the computation of the standard of comparison. Nominal AICs are compared and contrasted with a surfaceidentical construction I call the clausal AIC, with attributive too, and with attributive comparatives ; they are shown to exhibit major syntactic and semantic differences from all of these. The paper serves both as a contribution to the semantic literature on gradability and as a contribution to the descriptive grammar of English, as it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first systematic description and analysis of the nominal AIC.
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