This paper presents a corpus study of the order between subject and object in German main and embedded clauses. Since prior studies have shown that object-subject (OS) sentences are rare in comparison to subject-object (SO) sentences, for both main and embedded clauses two corpora were assembled: One corpus containing both SO and OS sentences, and a second corpus containing only OS sentences. I...

This paper explores the source of case patterns in various monadic and dyadic unaccusative constructions in Russian and Ukrainian in light of the tension between what we call “Nominative First” and nominativeless “Accusative First” case assignment strategies. Nominative First states that if nominative is available it must be used; Accusative First is then the assignment of accusative regardless...

This study used fMRI to inform a debate between two theories concerning the representation of reflexive verbs. Reflexives are verbs that denote an action that the subject applies on herself (e.g., The woman stretched). These verbs are derived by a lexical operation that creates a reflexive from its transitive counterpart. Theories differ with respect to which thematic role is reduced by the lex...

In this discussion, I am concerned with the argument presented in Chomsky (1999, 15-21) that a specific movement rule, which he labels TH/EX for ‘thematisation/extraposition,’ is properly located in the phonological component of a grammar of English. This is a provocative proposal, not least because it raises interesting questions of implementation. Additionally, it has the consequence that, in...

German sentences with man and Italian si impersonale or passivante are often presented as equivalent in contrastive grammars. However, this functional equation proves to be problematic when students refer their own role authors, such in: “Darauf wird aber im folgenden Kapitel eingehen”. Evidently, cannot the speaker role, while same context is well suitable. Starting from interference error, pa...

The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE subcorpora (Italian and Spanish). The question has been dealt with before in the literature with emphasis on the production of ungrammatical inversion structures in L2 English of speakers from a variety of L1s, but in quite a scattered, unsystematic and rather intuitive fashion. Our approach seeks t...

Recent work on the morphology/syntax interface has argued that there is no separate component for lexical operations (Halle & Marantz 1993, Miyagawa 1994, Marantz 1997). Hale & Keyser (1993) argue that the operations giving rise to verb alternations are syntactic, with each argument’s thematic role determined by the position in which it is merged. Harley (1995) further proposes that Hale & Keys...

Tingchun Chen, MIT This paper proposes an analysis of Amis (Formosan, Austronesian; VSO) case alternations, implemented in a dependent case model (Marantz 1991), in which nominals crucially may receive case multiple times. Moreover, I argue that, contra some previous proposals, e.g. Levin (2016), the presence of a nominal in multiple phases is not a prerequisite for multiple case assignments, b...

whether or not there is a verbal passive construction in persian has been ‎highly controversial. traditional grammarians and most linguists have ‎argued that there is a structural passive construction in persian, similar to ‎that observed in english. within the framework of the minimalist ‎program, but more in the spirit of emonds’s (2006) division of analytic ‎passives into verbal and adjectiv...