Ergativity, Raising and Restructuring in the Syntax of Spanish Aspectual Verbs

Schroten, Jan

doi:10.1075/li.10.2.11sch

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Within generative syntactic theory, most linguists have argued that a primary function of Spanish se is to derive variations in sentence meaning by ''absorbing'' one of the noun phrase (NP) arguments that are normally possible for a given verb (Cinque, 1988;Dobrobie-Sorin, 1998;Grimshaw, 1990;Levin & Rappaport-Hovav, 1995;Manzini, 1986;Raposo & Uriagereka, 1996;Schroten, 1986;Wehrli, 1986). Thus, in Example 2a, when se absorbs the patient argument such that only an agent appears, a reflexive or reciprocal meaning is rendered.…”

Section: Spanish Anticausative Se's Compatibility With Processing Insmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Instruction and a Role for Output in Second Language Acquisition

Toth

2006

Language Learning

107

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This study addresses the role of output in second language (L2) acquisition by comparing processing instruction (PI) to communicative output (CO) tasks. Participants included 80 English-speaking adults from six university course sections of beginning L2 Spanish, with two assigned to each treatment (PI ¼ 27; CO ¼ 28) and two others comprising a control group (n ¼ 25). Instruction lasted 7 days and targeted the anticausative clitic se. One lesson was videotaped and transcribed in each treatment group. Results on grammaticality judgment and guided production tasks administered before, immediately after, and 24 days following instruction

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Section: Spanish Anticausative Se's Compatibility With Processing Insmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Instruction and a Role for Output in Second Language Acquisition

Toth

2006

Language Learning

107

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“…Since Perlmutter (1968Perlmutter ( , 1970 argued that English aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising 1 , the phenomenon has been argued or assumed to exist in a number of other languages, such as French (Lamiroy 1987, Ruwet 1991, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Greek (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1999), Hebrew (Landau 2003), Italian (Rizzi 1982, Burzio 1986, Japanese (Shibatani 1973, 1978, Kuno 1987, Nishigauchi 1993, Kageyama 1993, Matsumoto 1996, Koizumi 1998, and Spanish (Schroten 1986, Moore 1996, suggesting that it is common cross-linguistically. This paper takes up the issue of how the control/raising ambiguity with aspectual verbs should be accounted for.…”

Section: Introduction*mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the control/raising ambiguity with aspectual verbs: a structural account

Fukuda¹

2007

Zaspil

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In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.

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“…It is a matter of further research to explain these differences. Perlmutter (1968 argued that English aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising 1 , the phenomenon has been argued or assumed to exist in a number of other languages, such as French (Lamiroy 1987, Ruwet 1991, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Greek (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1999), Hebrew (Landau 2003), Italian (Rizzi 1982, Burzio 1986, Japanese (Shibatani 1973, Nishigauchi 1993, Kageyama 1993, Koizumi 1998, and Spanish (Schroten 1986, Moore 1996, suggesting that it is common cross-linguistically. This paper takes up the issue of how the control/raising ambiguity with aspectual verbs should be accounted for.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Studies in complement control

Stiebels¹

2007

Zaspil

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This volume represents a collection of papers that present some of the results of two projects on control: on the one hand, the project Typology of complement control directed by Barbara Stiebels and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG STI 151/2-2), and on the other hand the project Variation in control structures directed by Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam and funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF grants BCS-0131946, BCS-0131993; website http://accent.ucsd.edu/). Whereas the first project pursued a lexical approach to control with a semantic definition of obligatory control, the second project has mainly pursued a syntactic approach to control – with special emphasis on less studied control structures (such as adjunct control, backward control, finite control, etc.). Both projects have aimed at extending the research on complement control to structures that differ from the prototypical cases of infinitival complements with empty subjects found in many Indo-European languages; their common interest was to bring in new empirical data, both primary and experimental.

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Ergativity, Raising and Restructuring in the Syntax of Spanish Aspectual Verbs

Cited by 5 publications

References 1 publication

Processing Instruction and a Role for Output in Second Language Acquisition

Processing Instruction and a Role for Output in Second Language Acquisition

On the control/raising ambiguity with aspectual verbs: a structural account

Studies in complement control

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