Restrictions on reflexive and anti-causative readings in nominalizations and participles

Abstract

This article discusses the absence of reflexive or self-caused readings in certain types of participles and de-verbal nominalizations, like the hanging of the suicidal patient and The suicidal patient was hanged yesterday. I argue that the "anti-reflexive" reading is not triggered by the presence of a subject PRO or pro, but rather by the absence of reflexive marking, i.e. overt marking that functions to recode lexically specified co-reference relations between the arguments of a predicate. I argue that the verb-phrase needs to be decomposed into at least two subparts/subevents and that each sub-event carries information about the participants involved in it (as in e.g. Pustejovsky 1995 and Ramchand 2008b). More specifically, arguments receive their thematic information from indices on verbal heads that introduces sub-events. Event-denoting nominalizations and participles in general inherit the event structure from the verb, i.e. the indices present in the verbal roots. I further argue that simple reflexives can be verbal heads, that are inserted as a last resort when there is a mismatch between the lexically stored information of a verb and the structure generated in the syntax. This article focuses on data from Swedish, but comparisons will be made with English.

Long passives in Norwegian: Evidence for complex predicates

“…However, Wiklund (2007:87) claims that Swedish does not have the transparency phenomena that have been used to argue for reanalysis in other languages, such as long passives. The same claim is made in passing in Lundquist (2009:120, 127). (Both Wiklund and Lundquist have footnotes about possible exceptions.)…”

SE in Spanish

“…There is a huge body of work about anticausative structures, the relations between the causative and the anticausative version and the correct notion of 'causation' that should be involved in such cases (see, just to name a few, Jespersen 1927, Nedjalkov 1969, Fillmore 1970, Smith 1970, Chierchia 1989, Labelle 1992, Haspelmath 1993, Levin 1993, Levin & Rappaport-Hovav 1995, Reinhart 2000, Doron 2003, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2004, Dobrovie-Sorin 2006, Schäfer 2008, Koontz-Garboden 2009, Labelle & Doron 2010, Rappaport-Hovav & Levin 2010, Lundquist 2011, Mendikoetxea 2012, Vivanco 2015, to name just a few examples).…”

L-syntax and phono-symbolism: on the status of ideophones in complexpredicates

“…Using an event-based decomposition of the VP along the lines of Ramchand (2008) (see also Svenonius 2008, Lundquist 2008) suppose that ideophones, as archetypal unergative predicates, are endowed with [ init, proc ] category features. The argument of such a predicate initiates or gives rise to an event, and thus undergoes the event.…”