A Semantics for Unaccusatives and its Syntactic Consequences

Chierchia, Gennaro

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257652.003.0002

Cited by 255 publications

(198 citation statements)

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“…The debate on whether reflexives are unaccusative or unergative goes back at least to Kayne (1975) and Marantz (1984); see Chierchia (2004), Doron & Rappaport Hovav (2009) and Sportiche (2014) for recent contrasting views. The answer may vary by language, depending on how a given language promotes its internal arguments.…”

Section: Reflexive Verbs In Hebrew 25mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics

Kastner

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Reflexive verbs in Modern Hebrew show specific morphological marking: only one of the seven verbal templates in the language can be used for reflexives. Yet this morphological marking also appears on anticausative verbs, which have different syntactic and semantic properties. I provide an analysis of reflexivity in Hebrew which does not make reference to dedicated reflexive morphosyntax. By combining independently needed functional heads, the proposal explains what in the syntax underlies this morphology and how different kinds of verbs end up with identical morphophonological properties. To this end, I consider the lexical semantics of individual lexical roots as well as the syntactic configurations in which roots and arguments are embedded. The resulting theory is one in which lexical roots trigger specific interpretations of the syntax at the interfaces.

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Section: Reflexive Verbs In Hebrew 25mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics

Kastner

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Instead, one is lead to search for a unified analysis of the reflexive and anticausative semantic categories that could motivate their identical marking. In the case of anticausativization and reflexivization, such an analysis has indeed been argued for by Chierchia (2004) and Koontz-Garboden (2009a), who reduce the semantics of anticausativization to the semantics of reflexivization. 1 We believe such crosslinguistically robust cases of syncretism are often manifestations of deep grammatical generalizations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Possessed properties in Ulwa

Koontz‐Garboden

Francez

2010

Nat Lang Semantics

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This paper explores an understudied and poorly understood phenomenon of morphological syncretism in which a morpheme otherwise used to mark the head of a possessive NP appears on words naming property concept (PC) states (states named by adjectives in languages with that lexical category; Dixon 1982) in predicative and attributive contexts. This phenomenon is found across a variety of unrelated languages. We examine its manifestation in Ulwa, an endangered Misumalpan language of Nicaragua, where diachronic evidence clearly shows that a single affix is involved. We propose an explanation for the syncretism based on an explicit syntactic and semantic analysis of the relevant constructions. On the proposed explanation, the syncretism arises out of a combination of semantic and morphosyntactic facts of Ulwa grammar. Specifically, we propose that the Ulwa pattern exemplifies a possessive strategy of predication. Intuitively, this strategy is a manifestation in grammar of the idiomatic equivalence between the property of being F and the property of having F-ness.

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“…Much of the literature adopts the view that reflexives are unaccusatives: the clitic absorbs the external argument (Marantz 1984;Bouchard 1984;Grimshaw 1990), or is itself the external argument (Kayne 1988;Pesetsky 1995;Sportiche 1988). However, it has also been argued that reflexive verbs are unergatives, formed through the elimination of the internal theta role (Chierchia 2004;Reinhart 1996;Reinhart & Siloni 2004). Specifically, Chierchia and then Reinhart define the argument structure of reduction, which Reinhart and Siloni (2004) describe as follows:…”

Section: Matching the Syntax To The Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How many theta roles in a reflexive verb?

Dimitriadis¹,

Everaert²

2014

Acta Linguistica Hungarica

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While purely syntactic approaches to reflexivization have characterized reflexive verbs in terms of detransitivization, we show that there is a discrepancy between syntactic and semantic arity. Reflexive verbs are syntactically intransitive, but semantically they are two-place predicates: both semantic roles of the base verb are syntactically encoded and accessible. We show that detransitivizing reflexivization must involve the assignment of both roles to the same individual, along the lines of the argument-structure operation of bundling (Reinhart & Siloni 2005), which combines two semantic roles into a single complex role. This allows the bundled roles to be assigned to a single syntactic argument, without special syntactic measures and without violating the theta criterion. We will give empirical support for this analysis by recalling evidence that reflexive verbs are intransitive, and by demonstrating that both theta roles are present in reflexive predicates and are syntactically accessible.

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A Semantics for Unaccusatives and its Syntactic Consequences

Cited by 255 publications

References 4 publications

Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics

Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics

Possessed properties in Ulwa

How many theta roles in a reflexive verb?

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