Agreement and the Icelandic Passive: A Smuggling Account

Agreement and the Icelandic Passive1

We propose an analysis of the morphology of dative-nominative passives in Icelandic. This account is based on a previous proposal of active predicates which alternate between a dative-nominative and nominative-dative case frame (Wood and Sigurðsson 2014). We show that obligatory agreement with the nominative in the passive is the consequence of the absence of the dative intervention effect whic...

A Lexicalist Account of Icelandic Case Marking

Recent theoretical descriptions of the Icelandic case system distinguish between lexicai and structural case. Lexical case is assigned in ttle lexiCOIl, whereas structural case is assigned in syntax, under tim provision that it does not override lexicai case assignment. This analysis is problematic for grammatical theories such as Categorial Unification Grammar (CUG) and Headdriven Phrase Struc...

A Smuggling Approach to the Passive in English

I propose a theory of the passive that combines aspects of the principles and parameters analysis (no specific rules, no downward movement) and Chomsky’s (1957) Syntactic Structures analysis (the arguments in the passive are generated in the same positions as they are in the active).

Agreement in the Nominal Domain: A View from Icelandic

Introduction: A central question for the theory of agreement is whether DP-internal agreement (concord) and argument-predicate agreement (A-P agreement) are instances of the same phenomenon occurring in different syntactic domains. From a simplistic standpoint they are the same phenomenon: Both involve features of one linguistic item being morphologically marked on another. While there is a ric...

The New Passive in Icelandic: A Dynamic Syntax Perspective