English and Dutch middle verbs have a grammaticalsubject that is the corresponding transitive verb's object. In this paper we will account for this fact by invoking the properties of a presyntactic level of semantic representation and its interplay with syntax proper. We will argue that the grammatical subject of a middle is its actual external argument, and we will propose a model of projection of arguments that allows for this. We will show that other special properties of middle constructions follow from the way the verbs logical subject is represented at the presyntactic level of representation.In particular, it will be shown that the Affectedness Condition on middle formation is not a condition on the type of argument that can apperlr as the middle verb's grammatical subject, but that its effects and some exceptions to it naturally follow from this representation. Our model will also allow an account of Dutch impersonal and 'adjunct' middles.
Kong (2011). We thank the respective audiences for useful questions and comments. We would also like to thank Valentina Bianchi, Antonio Fábregas, David Lobina, Andrew Nevins, Hans van de Koot, and Edwin Williams for discussion, as well as two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this special issue, Jochen Trommer.
A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression.
This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules.
The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.
The literature on processing of person and number agreement contains some apparently contradictory results. On the one hand, some ERP studies do not find a qualitative difference between person and number when an agreeing verb does not match the features of its subject, the controller of the agreement relation (
Silva-Pereyra and Carreiras, 2007
;
Zawiszewski et al., 2016
). On the other hand, an ERP study reported in
Mancini et al. (2011b)
did find a qualitative difference between agreement violations in person and agreement violations in number, a result further corroborated by an fMRI study reported in
Mancini et al. (2017)
. At the same time, there is also a trend on which the literature appears to agree: on the whole the response to agreement violations in person is stronger than the response to number agreement violations. In this paper we argue that the constellation of reported results can be accounted for by adopting a theory of person and number features that has the following two core properties: (i) pronouns are specified for both person and number, but regular NPs are specified for number only and do not carry any person specification; (ii) all of first, second and third person are characterized by one or more person features, whereas, in contrast, one of the numbers (singular) corresponds to the absence of number features.
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