Unaccusative Verbs in Romance Languages

The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics regarding such matters as auxiliary selection, partitive cliticization, bare subjects, participle agreement, and more. For the past two decades the Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He here re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan, and concludes that it is essentially unmotivated. Alternative explanations are advanced, based on information structure, semantics and the impact on synchrony of diachronic change. The picture that emerges is one of a complex but interrelated set of causalities.

Ian Mackenzie is Senior Lecture in Spanish at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgement

x

Sources of Historical Examples

xi

1 The Ergative Analysis and the Unaccusative Hypothesis

1

(16)

1.1 The Ergative Analysis

1

(4)

1.2 The Ergative Analysis versus the Unaccusative Hypothesis

5

(3)

1.3 General problems with the 'deep-object' hypothesis

8

(7)

1.4 Conclusion

15

(2)

2 Expletive Inversion

17

(22)

2.1 Introduction

17

(1)

2.2 Expletives and unergative subjects

18

(2)

2.3 Partitive case

20

(10)

2.4 A preliminary conclusion about expletive inversion

30

(1)

2.5 Distribution of French it

31

(6)

2.6 Conclusion

37

(2)

3 Partitive Cliticization

39

(31)

3.1 Introduction

39

(1)

3.2 Syntactic arguments

40

(15)

3.3 Partitive cliticization independent of unaccusative-unergative distinction

55

(5)

3.4 The distribution of partitive ne/en

60

(7)

3.5 Conclusion

67

(3)

4 Bare Subjects

70

(33)

4.1 Introduction

70

(3)

4.2 Unergatives can have bare postverbal subjects

73

(5)

4.3 Constraints on bare subject distribution

78

(17)

4.4 Aspectually stative constructions

95

(4)

4.5 Modified and conjoined bare subjects

99

(2)

4.6 Conclusion

101

(2)

5 Perfect Auxiliary Selection

103

(59)

5.1 Introduction

103

(1)

5.2 Burzio's theory

104

(5)

5.3 Accounts based on the nature of the auxiliaries

109

(2)

5.4 Comparison between Italian and French

111

(6)

5.5 Auxiliary selection is not directly semantic

117

(12)

5.6 The historical perspective

129

(30)

5.7 Conclusion

159

(3)

6 Past Participle Agreement

162

(10)

6.1 The basic patterns

162

(2)

6.2 Agreement by movement

164

(1)

6.3 The problem of postverbal subjects

165

(3)

6.4 Fragmentation of the system

168

(2)

6.5 Conclusion

170

(2)

7 Participial Absolutes

172

(10)

7.1 The basic data

172

(1)

7.2 Structural analyses of participial absolutes

173

(5)

7.3 Unergative subjects in participial absolutes

178

(2)

7.4 Conclusion

180

(2)

8 Conclusion

182

(5)

Notes

187

(25)

References

212

(8)

Index

220

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Unaccusative Verbs in Romance Languages

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials