Passive, Causative, and Light Verbs: a Study on Theta Role Assignment

Hoshi, Hiroto

doi:10.1515/jjl-1998-0109

Cited by 10 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…Whereas analyzes Mandarin long passives like English tough constructions under the proposal of Chomsky (1981), he analyzes Mandarin short passives like English get-passives under the proposals of Hoshi (1991Hoshi ( , 1994a. While familiar be passives involve raising from VP-internal position to subject position (80a), get passives involve a combination of raising + control.…”

Section: Short Passivization As Pro Raisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psych verbs in English and Mandarin

Cheung

Larson

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Psych verb constructions show peculiar properties. They appear to project the same θ-relations into inverse configurations (John fears sharks/Sharks frighten John). Furthermore, Experiencer Object psych verb constructions admit backward binding in apparent violation of familiar c-command conditions (Pictures of himself anger John). We offer a solution to both puzzles drawing crucially on data from English and Mandarin. We argue that apparent θ-role inversion is an illusion, and that Experiencer Subject psych verb constructions like John fears sharks are not in fact simple transitive constructions but instead involve a concealed clause with a silent predicate (John fears [CP sharks PRED]). Regarding backward binding, we argue for an updated version of Belletti and Rizzi's (1988) analysis of Experiencer Object psych verbs in which the putative Theme is a Source that is underlyingly c-commanded by the Experiencer.Keywords psych verbs · intensionality · concealed complement clauses · applicatives· English · Mandarin 1 Introduction: The problem of psych constructionsPsych constructions pose a number of challenges to syntactic theory. As shown in (1)- (2), Experiencer Subject (ES) and Experiencer Object (EO) psych verbs in English appear to assign the same θ-roles of Experiencer and Theme. 1 But the structural positions of the corresponding arguments are reversed or "flipped" in the two constructions (Lakoff 1970;Postal 1974). This apparent "θ-role inversion" challenges the Universal Alignment Hypothesis (UAH) of Perlmutter and Postal (1984) and the corresponding Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) of Baker (1988), which require identical thematic relationships to be realized in identical structural configurations. The exact identity of the non-experiencer θ-role in (1) and (2) is controversial; we label it here as THEME mainly for convience. The important point is that the same pair of roles appears to be involved in the two exemples; we return to a more careful discussion of this issue below. 2 In this study we concentrate on what Landau (2010) terms "Class I" psych verbs like fear and "Class II" psych verbs like frighten, largely putting aside discussion of his "Class III" psych verbs like appeal; the latter resemble the Class II type, but exhibit a dative preposition (to) on the experiencer (or, in other languages, dative case marking) as opposed to a simple accusative object (i): THEME EXPERIENCERThe idea appealed to Julie. (Landau 2010: 6) This is the Pre-Published Version.

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Section: Short Passivization As Pro Raisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psych verbs in English and Mandarin

Cheung

Larson

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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“…Then, unless some evidence for Agr 30. For a recent discussion of Japanese passive constructions in general, see Hoshi (1994).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Invisible Agr in Japanese

Koizumi¹

1998

The Linguistic Review

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The purpose of this article is to show that, even in a language like Japanese which lacks overt morphological agreement, Agreement Phrases not only exist, but also play an important role in the grammar. Evidence comes primarily from facts about scope interaction in certain complex predicate constructions. The article also presents indirect support for the core idea of Watanabe's (1993) three-layered Case theory.Since Pollock (1989) and Chomsky (1991), much work has been done on the Split Infl Hypothesis, according to which traditional Infl should be decomposed into several different syntactic categories including Tense and Agreement. There is, however, little agreement as to whether languages without overt agreement morphology have Agreement Phrases as characterized in , and two anonymous TLR reviewers. 2. In this paper, we will not be concerned with subject positions. Thus, they are not represented in structural descriptions (tree diagrams, etc.). For a recent discussion on subject positions, see Koizumi (1995). The Linguistic Review 15 (1998), 1-39 0167-6318/98/015-001 © Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | University of Queensland -UQ Library Authenticated Download Date | 6/16/15 12:06 PM 3. If Case is an LF requirement (and not an overt one), word order facts would not provide us with such information anyway (Howard Lasnik, personal communication).Brought to you by |

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“…As reported in Hoshi (1994aHoshi ( , 1994b, Japanese passives may involve idiom-chunks as subjects (and in such cases the agent phrase must be realized by a PP headed by niyotte). In the context of an intentional adverb, a control analysis is required, and the agent (if present) will take a dative case.…”

Section: The Fine Structure Of the Non-canonical Passivementioning

confidence: 91%

“…The proper analysis of the English get-passive has also been a matter of controversy in the recent past (involving authors such as Alexiadou 2005, Butler and Tsoulas 2006, Fox and Grodzinsky 1998, Haegeman 1985, Hoshi 1994a. The debates concern whether (3) should be analyzed in terms of raising as in (6) or control as in (7) In view of the recent discussions we would like to reconsider the issue of whether the non-canonical passives should be analyzed in terms of control/predication or in terms of raising.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A third major source of support points to the possibility of idiom-chunk subjects which, according to standard assumptions, must have been raised from below get: The raising analysis, however, is at odds with Hoshi's (1994aHoshi's ( , 1994b Whereas the raising proponents judge (11a-b) to be good, the control proponents consider them bad. While this may reflect dialectal or idiolectal differences, it seems also true that for those who accept (11), (12a-b) still sound better.…”

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Variations in non-canonical passives

Huang¹

2013

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

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Abstract. This paper shows that non-canonical passives (like English get-and Chinese bei-passives) exhibit a chameleonic character that makes them amenable to a control and/or a raising analysis-depending on context and lexical choice. Such passives are formed by superimposing on the main predicate a higher semi-lexical verb whose meaning may include one or more points in the causative-unaccusative spectrum. Such semi-lexical verbs may differ in their 'bandwidths' along the spectrum, exhibiting lexical, contextual and idiolectal micro-variation-accounting for the controversies that have often arisen in the literature. The paper demonstrates the need for fine-grained decomposition in argument structure theory by providing several concrete cases, and ends with a case study of so-called 'give-passives' in Mandarin, arguing that they are raising constructions involving an existential use of gei 'give' and an implicit affectee which gives rise to their passive-like meanings.

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Passive, Causative, and Light Verbs: a Study on Theta Role Assignment

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Psych verbs in English and Mandarin

Psych verbs in English and Mandarin

Invisible Agr in Japanese

Variations in non-canonical passives

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