Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Preprint (15)
- Part of a Book (6)
- Article (4)
- Conference Proceeding (3)
- Report (1)
Language
- English (29)
Has Fulltext
- yes (29)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (29) (remove)
Keywords
- Griechisch (9)
- Deutsch (8)
- Englisch (5)
- Nominalisierung (5)
- Hilfsverb (4)
- syntax (4)
- Neugriechisch (3)
- Adjektiv (2)
- Französisch (2)
- Mittelenglisch (2)
- Perfekt (2)
- Präposition (2)
- Rumänisch (2)
- case (2)
- Affigierung (1)
- Albanisch (1)
- Anapher <Syntax> (1)
- Bantu (1)
- Binding (1)
- Clitic Doubling (1)
- Clitic-Doubling (1)
- Determinativ (1)
- Flexion (1)
- Frühneuenglisch (1)
- Hebräisch (1)
- Italienisch (1)
- Kausativ (1)
- Khoisan (1)
- Kompositum (1)
- Modus (1)
- Mohawk (1)
- Morphem (1)
- Morphologie (1)
- Morphosyntax (1)
- Niederländisch (1)
- Nominalkompositum (1)
- Partizip (1)
- Passiv (1)
- Romanische Sprachen (1)
- Russisch (1)
- Scrambling (1)
- Skandinavische Sprachen (1)
- Spanisch (1)
- Spezifität (1)
- Subjekt (1)
- Syntax (1)
- Topik (1)
- Vergleich (1)
- agree (1)
- anticausatives (1)
- argument dislocation (1)
- auxiliaries (1)
- auxiliary selection (1)
- be (1)
- causatives (1)
- counterfactual (1)
- cyclicity (1)
- early modern english (1)
- epp (1)
- ergativity (1)
- features (1)
- have (1)
- hierarchies (1)
- middle english (1)
- old english (1)
- passives (1)
- perfect (1)
- person splits (1)
- phi-features (1)
- pp modification (1)
- resultative (1)
- root classes (1)
- semantics (1)
- subject inversion (1)
- syntactic decomposition (1)
Institute
- Extern (2)
This paper examines the development of periphrastic constructions involving auxiliary "have" and "be" with a past participle in the history of English, on the basis of parsed electronic corpora. It is argued that the two constructions represented distinct syntactic and semantic structures: while the one with have developed into a true perfect in the course of Middle English, the one with be remained a stative resultative throughout its history. In this way, it is explained why the be construction was rarely or never used in a number of contexts, including past counterfactuals, iteratives, duratives, certain kinds of infinitives and various other utterance types that cannot be characterized as perfects of result. When the construction with have became a true perfect, it was used in such contexts, regardless of the identity of the main verb, leading to the appearance of have with verbs like come which had previously only taken be. Crucially, however, have was not spreading at the expense of be, as the be perfect had never been used in such contexts, but rather at the expense of the old simple past. At least until the end of the Early Modern English period, the shift in the relative frequency of have and be perfects is to be explained in terms of the expansion of the former into new contexts, while the latter remained stable. A formal analysis is proposed, taking as its starting point a comparison with German which shows that the older English be perfect indeed behaves more like the German stative passive than its haben and sein perfects.
In this paper, we will argue for a novel analysis of the auxiliary alternation in Early English, its development and subsequent loss which has broader consequences for the way that auxiliary selection is looked at cross-linguistically. We will present evidence that the choice of auxiliaries accompanying past participles in Early English differed in several significant respects from that in the familiar modern European languages. Specifically, while the construction with have became a full-fledged perfect by some time in the ME period, that with be was actually a stative resultative, which it remained until it was lost. We will show that this accounts for some otherwise surprising restrictions on the distribution of BE in Early English and allows a better understanding of the spread of HAVE through late ME and EModE. Perhaps more importantly, the Early English facts also provide insight into the genesis of the kind of auxiliary selection found in German, Dutch and Italian. Our analysis of them furthermore suggests a promising strategy for explaining cross-linguistic variation in auxiliary selection in terms of variation in the syntactico-semantic structure of the perfect. In this introductory section, we will first provide some background on the historical situation we will be discussing, then we will lay out the main claims for which we will be arguing in the paper.
On the role of syntactic locality in morphological processes : the case of (Greek) derived nominals
(2008)
The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I briefly summarize the facts on English and Greek nominalizations. In section 3, I discuss English nominal derivation in some detail. In section 4, I turn to the question of licensing of AS in nominals. In section 5, I turn to the issue of the optionality of licensing of AS in the nominal system.
This paper deals with the variable position of adjectives in the Romanian DP. As all other Romance languages, Romanian allows for adjectives to appear in both prenominal and post-nominal position. In addition, however, Romanian has a third pattern: the so-called cel construction, in which the adjective in the post-nominal position is preceded by a determiner-like element, cel. This pattern is superficially similar to Determiner Spreading in Greek. In this paper we contrast the cel construction to Greek DS and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. We then present an analysis of cel as involving an appositive specification clause, building on de Vries (2002). We argue that the same structure is also involved in the context of nominal ellipsis, the second environment in which cel is found.
The aim of this paper is to address two main counterarguments raised in Landau (2007) against the movement analysis of Control, and especially against the phenomenon of Backward Control. The paper shows that unlike the situation described in Tsez (Polinsky & Potsdam 2002), Landau's objections do not hold for Greek and Romanian, where all obligatory control verbs exhibit Backward Control. Our results thus provide stronger empirical support for a theoretical approach to Control in terms of Movement, as defended in Hornstein (1999 and subsequent work).
We analyze English and Greek nominal synthetic compounds like truck driver and truck driving from a syntactic perspective couched within Distributed Morphology. We derive the main differences between the two languages from the different morphosyntactic status of the non-head nouns, which are roots in Greek but categorized words in English.
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.
In the recent literature the phenomenon of long distance agreement has become the focus of several studies as it seems to violate certain locality conditions which require that agreeing elements in general stand in clause-mate relationships. In particular, it involves a verb agreeing with a constituent which is located in the verb's clausal complement and hence poses a challenge for theories that assume a strictly local relationship for agreement. In this paper we present empirical evidence from Greek and Romanian for the reality of long distance agreement. Specifically, we focus on raising constructions in these two languages and we show that they do not involve movement but rather instantiate long distance agreement. We further argue that subjunctives allowing long distance agreement lack both a CP layer and semantic Tense. However, since the embedded verb also bears phi-features, these constructions pose a further problem for assumptions that view the presence of phi-features as evidence for the presence of a C layer. Finally, we raise the question of the common properties that these languages have that lead to the presence of long distance agreement.