Kratzer’s (1994, 2000) research on participles has shown that the properties of adjectival-stative and verbal-eventive passives are more transparent in languages like German where the two constructions differ in form than in languages like English where the two are homophonous. While it

Japanese was the first language with morphological affixation of causative morphemes to receive serious attention from generative grammarians. It is the first language of several important early generative theoreticians (Saito, Kuroda, Kuno). The typological differences between Japanese and English represented the first exploration of the Universal Grammar hypothesis that contrasted languages from unrelated language families. Consequently, its impact on generative linguistic theories in general and on Principles-and-Parameters approaches specifically has been very significant. The Japanese causative represents in a very pure form the problem of the morphology/syntax interface. Consequently, the causative construction is one of the most theoretically significant aspects of Japanese grammar, its three subtypes having attracted more attention and inspired more theoretical proposals than almost any other construction. Analyses of the causative have had a major influence on many foundational aspects of syntactic theory, including control, case marking, clause structure, theta-theory and argument structure, and the morphology-syntax interface. All of these issues have received extensive treatment in the literature, and this chapter will touch on many of them. We will, however, focus on the importance for linguistic theory of a single problem posed by the construction: In what component of the

DISTRIBUTED MORPHOLOGY (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993) is a research program in morphology which abandons the traditional generative Lexicon (Chomsky, 1965 and 1995, among many). Recent work argues that all generative processes, including derivational morphology, can be accomplished syntactically, the SINGLE ENGINE HYPOTHESIS (Marantz, 2001). In Chapter 1, I introduce the most recent work within DM which adopts and adapts Chomsky’s DERIVATION BY PHASE HYPOTHESIS to lexical-category formation. I then reanalyze some important and well-known data of Aronoff (1976) in order to show that the single engine hypothesis is motivated and explanatory. Chapter 2 proposes an analysis of two types of common deverbals nominalizations in Japanese. I argue that, actually, only one of the two types is deverbal; the other type is root-derived. Those root-derived nominalizations that contain apparent verbal transitivity markers, the focus of this chapter, raise a paradox for the single engine hypothesis because of their non-compositional semantics. I resolve it by adopting a proposal of den Dikken (1995)’s: anomalous transitivity markers are AFFIXAL PARTICLES. Chapter 3 concentrates on lexical causatives in Japanese. There is a widely-held view among linguists (Harley, 1995, 1996, Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995, Pinker, 1989, among many), that a lexical causative cannot be derived from a verb which has an agentive subject. Using observations of Matsumoto (1996) and data from idioms in Japanese I argue that no such semantic criterion applies in Japanese. Given the proper pragmatic reading, all verbs with agentive subject can have a mono-clausal causative partner. To put it another way, all verbs, regardless of their lexical semantics have lexical causatives in Japanese. This seemingly unique characteristic of Japanese is argued to be directly related to the fact that apparent transitivity markers in Japanese are affixal particles as argued in Chapter 2. Chapter 4 concludes with a comparison of transitivity marking in Turkish and Korean with Japanese. I argue differences support the affixal particle analysis for Japanese. The proposed analysis, under standard historical assumptions about Japanese, raises an issue about the diachronic direction of grammaticalizations. With Roberts and Roussou (2003)’s work on grammaticalizations as background, this issue is briefly discussed.

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The main goal of this dissertation is to determine the best theory of de re/de dicto intensionality. Recently, it has become apparent that the traditional scope theory of this phenomenon is inadequate, the most marked evidence for this being the scope paradoxes discussed in Fodor (1970), Bäuerle (1983), and Percus (2000). This work therefore discusses two theories designed to replace the traditional theory. The first such replacement is the situation pronoun theory, which posits covert pronouns in the syntax of natural language representing pairs of worlds and times. This theory overgenerates, though, in several areas where the scope theory does not. These are discussed in terms of several generalizations captured by the latter but not the former. First, extending work by Musan (1997), the Intersective Predicate Generalization (IPG) states that two nodes combined via Predicate Modification must be evaluated at the same world and time. To capture this generalization in the situation pronoun theory, a rule of Situation Economy is proposed, which favors natural language structures having fewer situation pronouns. However, three more generalizations

verbs as a probe into lexical and compositional semantics

Abstract not found

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Among scrambling verb-final languages there have been a number of different proposals about the syntactic structure of double object constructions (DOCs) and the underlying order of objects. In this paper, I focus on German and Turkish.

This paper will address the phenomenon of symmetrical objecthood using data from three Panoan languages: Shipibo-Konibo, Cashinawa, and Matsés. Symmetrical objecthood (SO) is defined as a