Changes in Psych-verbs: A reanalysis of little v

Aquest article estudia els verbs psicològics en la història de l’anglès. Com és ben sabut, moltes de les llengües modernes reanalitzen els objectes experimentadors com a subjectes experimentadors. Analitzo un d’aquests canvis en detall: el canvi en el verb fear des del seu significat original d’‘espantar, fer por’ al de ‘témer’. El motiu del canvi podria ser la desaparició de la marca morfològica del causatiu i un canvi en el conjunt dels verbs lleugers. Encara que els objectes experimentadors es perden de manera constant, mostro que alhora hi ha una renovació incessant a través dels manlleus i mitjançant canvis interns des de sentits d’impacte físic a sentits d’impacte mental. Finalment, analitzo un canvi en què els subjectes experimentadors es reanalitzen com a agents en un Sintagma Veu.The present paper examines psych-verbs in the history of English. As is well-known, object experiencers are reanalyzed as subject experiencers in many of the modern European languages. I discuss one such change in detail, namely the change in the verb fear from meaning ‘to frighten, cause to fear’ to meaning ‘to fear’. The reason for the change may be the loss of the morphologically overt causative and a change in the set of light verbs. Object experiencers are constantly lost but I show there is also a continual renewal through external borrowing and internal change from physical to mental impact. A last change I discuss is the one where Subject Experiencers are reanalyzed as Agents in a V(oice)P

A New Modal Cycle

A new set of modals is appearing in contemporary English. The epistemic modals with perfect have are forming a new class including mighta, coulda, woulda, shoulda, and musta, when they are used with an additional have and without a (present) perfect meaning. I look at their structure and examine possible determinacy violations when they (and the core modals) move to C. The data come from corpus and internet sources; the study is not a quantitative one because the change is not yet particularly frequent

Visibility and Clausal Arguments

This paper examines the Visibility Principle (cf. Chomsky 1981; 1 986a), which deals with the assignment of theta-roles to elements visible by means of Case. Because it requires arguments to have Case and predicates not to have Case, the principle, in its strong form, is broader than the Case Filter. The assumption that CPs and IPs do not have Case would weaken the Visibility Principle; however, evidence advanced here indicates both that CPs must be Case-marked and that IPs must be visible. Burzio's Generalization, which resembles the Visibility Principle, is examined and reformulated

Features and affix-hop

In this paper, I review how formal features are currently regarded and used in the Minimalist Program. Although features are the cornerstone in Minimalism, they are used in many different and conflicting ways. Features may seem particularly relevant to affix-hop because the affix has to be checked against a higher verb or auxiliary. Chomsky’s (1957) analysis of affix-hop has the affix connected with an auxiliary, e.g., the -en of have-en, move to a verb on its right, as in have see-en. This analysis is one of the high points of early generative grammar but, with each new instantiation of the generative model, it has needed adjustments and the phenomenon is still debated. I will elaborate on a proposal made in van Gelderen (2013) who argues that interpretable tense, mood, or aspect are in a low position being probed by the relevant uninterpretable features in a high position. This view I claim is consistent with data from change and acquisition. I also discuss the implications of this reliance on features for learnability and Universal Grammar

The Emphatic Origin of Reflexives

Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (1996

Not on the edge: the syntax and pragmatics of clause-initial negation in Swedish

The possibility of topicalizing sentential negation is severely restricted in the Germanic V2-languages. In this paper, we show that negative preposing was more frequent and less restricted in earlier stages of Swedish: approx. 8 % of all occurrences of negation are clause initial in Old Swedish, compared to less than 0.5 % in present day Swedish. We propose that this change in frequency can be traced to the syntactic status of the negative element. More specifically, we argue that Old Swedish eigh 'not' may function as a syntactic head and cliticize to the finite verb in [C-0]. This possibility is not open to the XP inte 'not' in Modern Swedish. In Modern Swedish, we argue that the restrictions on negative preposing instead are related to more general pragmatic restrictions on the information expressed in [Spec,CP]: according to our hypothesis, negative preposing is licensed by contrast

Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Wood

Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Woo