On Visser’s Effects, Control, and Weak Implicit Agents

Landau (2013) and van Urk (2011, 2013) use data involving VisserÕs Generalization to argue that (a) the understood thematic subject of a passive verb is syntactically projected as a weak implicit argument (WIA) and (b) antecedent resolution in obligatory control (OC) structures is determined by the syntactic processes of Agree and predication. This paper further examines sentences involving control and passivization and provides five areas in which improved empirical coverage is achieved under an account that makes the opposing assumptions, namely, that the external argument of a passive is syntactically unprojected (only being interpretatively available via existential binding or meaning postulates, as argued in Parsons (1990), Lasersohn (1993), and Bruening (2013)) and that the reference of PRO is determined post-syntactically, by a Bare Output Condition, as most recently suggested, e.g., in Reed (2014: Ch. 7).

Embedded Predicate Restrictions on Partial Control

Sheehan (2012, 2014) observes that Partial Control (PC) readings arise in Romance (but not in English) only with those embedded collective predicates that can take an overt comitative argument. She argues that this phenomenon, which she calls “fake PC,” arises indirectly from a silent comitative phrase present in the infinitive. Landau (2016a) convincingly shows, however, that her analysis is untenable by pointing out that certain elements associated with overt comitatives are systematically unavailable with PC complements. But if Sheehan’s analysis is untenable, we must now explain why the selective availability exhibited by Romance embedded predicates is not also present in English. In this paper, we claim first that there is no such thing as “fake PC,” that is, there is only one kind of PC and this phenomenon is subject to the same conditions in English as it is in Romance; second, that one such condition is that the embedded collective predicate have symmetric reciprocal semantics in the sense of Siloni 2002, 2012 and Dimitriadis 2004, 2008; and third, that the difference between English and Romance boils down to the fact that only reciprocals formed in the lexicon introduce symmetric semantics and that the set of reciprocals formed in the lexicon in English and that formed in the lexicon in Romance are not identical. Additionally, we explore the consequences of these differences for the theory of PC. Specifically, we show that Landau’s (2016a,b) characterization of PRO in PC as a group-denoting, syntactically singular but semantically plural pronoun cannot explain the fact that it can only be the subject of symmetric predicates and we also discuss another shortcoming of his approach tied to the mismatch between the morphological and semantic values on PC PRO exhibited by French

Against restructuring in modern French

Cinque (2002) examines those transparency effects that have been claimed to point to the existence of restructuring in French and concludes that quantifier and adverb climbing depend not on restructuring but, rather, on an irrealis context. In this paper, we show that restructuring does not play an active role in explaining the existence of en `of-it\u27 and y `there\u27 climbing or long movement in `easy-to-please\u27 constructions either, which leads to the conclusion that Modern French has no transparency effects of the restructuring kind. We then present three arguments against Cinque\u27s (2004) thesis that verbs of the restructuring class are universally functional verbs that appear with infinitives in a monoclausal configuration. Instead, we adopt the Cinque (2001)/Cardinaletti & Shlonsky (2004) approach according to which restructuring verbs can be merged either as lexical or functional verbs. We argue that this approach should be parametrized to yield three options that account for cross-linguistic/dialectal variation associated with restructuring

French Tough-Movement Infinitives as Deverbal Nominals

In this paper, we argue that predicates of the tough-class in French embed not a verbal infinitive but rather, a gerundive verbal noun. This hypothesis allows us to capture a number of unexpected restrictions on French tough-movement discussed by Legendre (1986). We show that these restrictions are best described as the inability of French tough-movement infinitives to be followed by complements that are disallowed in their corresponding argument-taking event nominals. Our analysis of such infinitives as nominalized elements correctly predicts that they should never be selected by auxiliaries, and that they should have suppressed external arguments in the sense of Grimshaw (1990)

Identifying Phonologically Overt Counterparts to Silent Elements: The Case of French Exceptives

A relatively recent development in the generative framework is the hypothesis that there exist in syntax silent elements (SEs) that have a semantic content that is recovered by accessing their phonologically overt counterparts (cf. Kayne 2005, 2012 and Her and Tsai 2015, among others). In this paper, we provide a careful assessment of the two SEs that have been argued by O’Neill (2011) and Homer (2015) to be present in the French (ne)…que exceptive construction; namely silent rien ‘nothing’ and silent autre ‘other’. In doing so, we take to heart one of the main points made by Her and Tsai (2015) in relation to their criticism of Kayne (2012); namely, that for a proposed SE to be learnable, there cannot be any deviation in meaning from its overt counterpart. That is, the recoverability constraint assumed in the generative framework to be at work in, say, PF-deletion ellipsis, applies to all phonologically silent categories, including SEs. Additionally, as Her and Tsai argue, if semantic deviance between SEs and their phonologically overt counterparts were allowed, SEs would become ‘empirically intractable’. We argue that while positing a silent n-word in (ne)…que is faithful to the recoverability constraint on silent categories, the alleged second SE, namely, silent autre ‘other’, is not semantically equivalent to its phonologically overt counterpart in several respects. As we demonstrate, however, if one assumes instead that its overt counterpart is plus ‘more’, the recoverability requirement is restored

An Aspectual Analysis of French Demonstrative ce

Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Semantic Typology and Semantic Universals (1993