Abstract
Object experiencers have been the object of study for many years now. The extensive analysis by Beletti and Rizzi (1988) proposed to treat those verbs as unaccusative. This approach was later revisited by Pesetsky (1995), who provided arguments against the wholesale unaccusative treatment of object experiencer verbs, introducing a finer-grained semantic division among them. Recently, Landau (2010) has come up with an analysis which at first blush reconciles the two earlier treatments. The crucial part of the analysis concerns the status of verbal passives. Following a thorough cross-linguistic study, Landau concludes that languages fall into two types with regard to the presence of verbal passives, the first type exemplified by languages such as English, Finnish or Dutch, which possess verbal passives for eventive verbs only; the second type represented by Italian, French or Hebrew, which have no verbal passives at all. However, this neat typology seems to run into problems in Polish. It appears that Polish, which shares some properties of each of the two groups, falls out of the proposed classification. This paper briefly reviews the previous treatments of experiencer verbs and highlights the areas where Polish stands out, putting forth possible ways to refine the existent analyses.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
It has been one of the challenges to prove UTAH right or wrong. In its original formulation, it is as follows:
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1.
Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH)
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Identical thematic relationships between items are represented by identical structural relationships between those items at the level of D-Structure (Baker 1988: 45).
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A weaker version of UTAH was proposed by Perlmutter and Postal (1984), which reads as UAH.
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2.
Universal Alignment Hypothesis (UAH)
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There exist principles of UG which predict the initial relation borne by each [argument] in a given clause from the meaning of the clause.
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In Zero syntax (1995), Pesetsky argues that it is actually possible to keep UTAH intact on the novel assumption that the repository of thematic roles is governed by finer-grained semantics, making it possible to distinguish among different types of the theme role.
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1.
- 3.
Only the Italian examples are cited, but English, Russian or Polish, to mention just a few languages, exemplify a similar pattern, e.g. in Polish:
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3.
Janek boi się tego.
John fears this
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4.
To przeraża Janka.
This frightens John
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5.
Jankowi podoba się to.
To John (Dat) pleases REFL it
To podoba się Jankowi.
It pleases REFL to John
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3.
- 4.
This is possible if unaccusativity is restricted to the lack of structural case.
- 5.
If not indicated otherwise, all references regarding Landau will consider this monograph.
- 6.
Landau follows here the tradition of Jackendoff’s decompositional analysis of mental states (1990), refined in the works of Bouchard and Arad, among others.
- 7.
The distinction is finer-grained, though its details are not of primary significance in the context of this presentation. As a matter of fact, there is a structural difference between stative/eventive object experiencers as well as agentive/non-agentive ones. For further reference, see Landau (2005, 2010).
- 8.
For Pesetsky, the presence of a progressive aspect and the choice of prepositions are some of the diagnostics for the verbal status of passives.
- 9.
An anonymous abstract reviewer pointed out that in Russian similar reflexivization facts obtain:
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6.
Ivan volnuetsja.
Ivan worries-himself
This, in fact, may be a further fact obscuring Landau’s analysis. Alternatively, it may suggest that the clitic reflexivization is not a true instance of reflexivization.
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6.
- 10.
Similarly, different facts corroborating the locative nature of object experiencers are not unambiguous in Polish, e.g. object control into adjunct clauses and Super-Equi control facts.
- 11.
Other arguments relate to Adjunt Control, Functional Readings and Forward Binding.
- 12.
OC stands for Obligatory Control.
- 13.
As Landau (2001: 120) says, (50) “corresponds to the cross-linguistic observation that embedded clauses are typically peripheral to the VP and seldom intervene between a predicate and other internal arguments”.
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Żychliński, S. (2011). A Recalcitrant Nature of Object Experiencers. In: Pawlak, M., Bielak, J. (eds) New Perspectives in Language, Discourse and Translation Studies. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20083-0_6
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