This paper proposes an analysis in which passive by-phrases are merged as the arguments of the active with the corresponding theta roles (
This article focuses on Clitic Left Dislocation of XPs in French and Greek. By examining the interpretive properties of these XPs, primarily reconstruction properties, it concludes that they have been displaced from their first merge position via movement into (sometimes) a succession of hierarchically organized middle-field positions first above vP then above T and on to the left periphery via standard A or A-bar steps (no mixed options are needed). Furthermore, pronominal clitics have long raised questions regarding their surface distribution (external merge in situ only or not), and their interpretive properties. As these XPs are doubled by clitics, it becomes possible to allocate properties of the doublet (clitic, XP) to its individual members. This article concludes that these clitics all occur high above T, in designated positions and that clitics do not have referential import, only the XPs that double them do.
This paper systematically investigates reconstruction properties of Greek clitic doubled objects, motivates an analysis, and shows how this new evidence distinguishes between the numerous existing analyses of Clitic Doubling (CD). It is shown that CD-ed objects are externally merged in argument positions, not adjunct (pace Philippaki-Warburton et al. 2004) and that they must undergo XP/X max movement, by contrast to non CD-ed objects, into the middle field between vP and TP, like A-scrambling (Sportiche 1996). Alternative analyses where the doubled object undergoes X 0 /X min movement (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1997; Preminger 2019 i.a.) or feature movement (Anagnostopoulou 2003; Marchis & Alexiadou 2013) are shown to be unable to capture this data. Furthermore, the paper argues that CD-ed XPs undergo movement into the middle field in order to license a syntactic feature that relates to their interpretive properties. It also considers the interpretive properties of clitics, and shows that they are expletive determiners lacking semantic import. Lastly, it suggests that clitics can only be present if certain locality conditions are satisfied.
We investigate how saturation of different theta-roles by the non-head constituent correlates with derivational suffixes and, in turn, with the event structures compatible with those suffixes. We also investigate XP realisations of themes, causers and instruments in deverbal nominal and participial constructions and which ±agentive and/or ±process/episodic sub-readings allow which type of argument. It turns out that for each theta-role, the contexts that allow an XP realisation are exactly the complement of the contexts that would allow compounding of that same theta-role. We take this complementarity to be an indirect argument in favour of (i) divorcing argument licensing from argument selection and (ii) dissociating argument introduction from event-structure-related heads, which then potentially reaffirms the role of roots in (first phase) syntax.
Binding theory Condition A must be so formulated as to accommodate the range of behaviors exhibited by anaphors crosslinguistically. In this respect, the behavior of the Modern Greek anaphor o eaftos mu is theoretically important, as it has been reported to display a number of unusual distributional properties. This has led to treatments by Iatridou (1988) and Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) different from the treatment of standard anaphors represented by English himself, thus requiring a rethinking of the classic Condition A descriptive generalization and its theoretical derivation. This article revisits the distribution of this expression, documenting that previous discussions are subject to a confound as this expression (a) is not always a reflexive and (b) has logophoric uses. Controlling for the nonanaphoric use of o eaftos mu as well as for logophoricity and relying on new data surveys, we conclude that when anaphoric, it is in fact a well-behaved standard anaphor from the point of view of the standard Condition A (akin to the version in Chomsky 1986).
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