The Minimalist Syntax Of Defective Domains
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The Minimalist Syntax of Defective Domains
Author: Acrisio Pires
language: en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date: 2006-01-01
This book unifies the analysis of certain non-finite domains, focusing on subject licensing, agreement, and Case and control. It proposes a minimalist analysis of English gerunds which allows only a null subject PRO (TP-defective gerunds), a lexical subject (gerunds as complements of perception verbs), or both types of subjects (clausal gerunds). It then analyzes Portuguese infinitives, showing that the morphosyntactic properties of non-inflected and inflected infinitives correlate with distinct treatments of obligatory and non-obligatory control. It explores these and other phenomena to show that tense and event binding do not correlate with the contrast between control and raising/exceptional case marking (ECM), against null Case theories of control. A Probe-Goal approach to Case and agreement is adopted in combination with a movement analysis of control. The book then investigates diachronic morphosyntactic phenomena involving infinitives, verb movement and cliticization in Portuguese, exploring a cue-based theory of syntactic change grounded in language acquisition.
The Syntax of (anti-)causatives
Author: Florian Schäfer
language: en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date: 2008
This book develops an approach to the causative alternation that assumes syntactic event decomposition and a configurational theta theory. It is couched within the framework of the Minimalist Program and, especially, within Distributed Morphology. Central to the work is the syntax and semantics of canonical external arguments of causative verbs as well as of oblique causers and causative PPs in the context of anticausative verbs in different languages such as Germanic, Romance, Balkan, and Caucasian languages. The book also develops a new account of the origin and nature of the morphological marking which is often found on anticausatives across languages. The main claim is that this morphology is a reflex of a syntactic way to prohibit the assignment of the external theta role. Moreover, the book develops an account about the origin of the implicit agent in generic middles which often bear the same morphology as marked anticausatives.
Applicatives
"Applicatives" is concerned with the syntax of constructions that contain arguments that transcend the traditional subject-object characterization, and how the syntax of such constructions yields the interpretive effects that previous research has identified. At the empirical level this volume remedies the inadequacies and limitations of previous accounts by proposing a more nuanced view of all the factors that enter into the syntax and semantics of applicatives. At the theoretical level, this book offers empirical arguments for various theoretical options currently entertained in the minimalist program, among which movement into theta-position, multiple agree, anti-locality, and a very derivational view on successive cyclic movement.