Linguistics Beyond and Within, 2015, Vol. 1

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12153/7151

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 12
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    What makes you move? A minimalist study of object displacement in English Double Object Construction
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2015) Bartczak-Meszyńska, Aleksandra
    The aim of this paper is to analyse the displacement phenomena the direct and indirect objects in the English Double Object Construction (DOC) can undergo. The focus is on the movement out of the DOC to the sentence initial position. The analysis concerns not only globally acceptable Goal-Theme object sequence but also the Theme-Goal DOC, which grammaticality is restricted only to a few British English dialects. The processes affecting the objects in the Prepositional Construction are also mentioned. The initial part of the paper is devoted to the underlying syntactic representations of the DOC in English. Following, e.g. Citko (2011), Cuervo (2003), Pylkkännen (2002, 2008), a representation with the Low Applicative Phrase has been adopted. The exact case valuation mechanism for relevant objects (as proposed by Bondaruk and Bartczak-Meszyńska (2014)) has been established. The remaining part of this paper contains a detailed discussion of the derivation of particular object initial sentences with the DOC in the active and in the passive and the interplay between passivisation and topicalisation, as the triggers of the object fronting.
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    Derivatives based on participles in Irish and Polish and the inflection–derivation distinction
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2015) Bloch-Trojnar, Maria
    Greenberg’s Universal 28 says that ‘if both the derivation and inflection follow the root, or they both precede the root, the derivation is always between the root and the inflection’ (Greenberg 1966: 93). Booij (1994: 27) undermines this by allowing inherent inflection to feed derivation. There is abundant literature showing that inherent inflection can feed derivation in Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages (Booij 1994, 1996, Chapman 1996, Rainer 1996, Cetnarowska 1999). The aim of this paper is to describe and compare derivational categories related to participle forms in Irish and Polish. These include among others agent nouns, adjectives of tendency/inclination, resultative passive adjectives and facilitative adjectives. Stump (2005: 52) points out that the terms present and past participle are, in fact, misnomers since participles are uninflected for tense, and they should be regarded as stems conveying aspect information plus the lexical information of the root. The existence of derivatives based on inflected forms is usually taken as evidence against the inflection-derivation dichotomy, and in favour of a tripartition into contextual inflection, inherent inflection and derivation. The paper addresses the theoretical ramifications of the existence of such derivatives for inferential-realisational approaches (Stump 2001), such as for example Beard’s (1995) Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology, which separates the operations on the grammatical (morpholexical and morphosyntactic) features and operations responsible for the morphophonological modification of the root/stem.
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    A comparison of the modal dać się structure with the dispositional middle in Polish
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2015) Bondaruk, Anna
    The paper compares the modal dać się structure with the dispositional middle in Polish. It is argued that the two structures are similar as regards argument realization, i.e. in both constructions, the theme argument appears in the structural subject position. The two structures also have a dispositional meaning in common. However, they show a number of differences. They differ in the presence of a syntactically active agent, their aspectual properties, the availability of episodic interpretations, the obligatory presence of an adverbial modifier, and verb class restrictions. Although these differences seem to argue against a common syntactic derivation for the two structures analysed here, they do not preclude classifying the modal dać się structure as a subtype of the dispositional middle. If middles are seen as a notional category, understood as a special meaning that different grammatical structures can have, along the lines postulated by Condoravdi (1989), then the modal dać się structure can be subsumed under the label of middle. In fact, it is argued that the modal dać się structure represents Type II middles in Ackema and Schoorlemmer’s (2005) typology, and it shows properties typical of lassen-middles in German (Pitteroff 2014).
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    Ad hoc properties and locations in Maltese
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2015) Dalmi, Gréte
    This paper aims to show that the four-way BE-system of Maltese can best be accommodated in a theory of non-verbal predication that builds on alternative states, without making any reference to the Davidsonian spatio-temporal event variable. The existing theories of non-verbal predicates put the burden of explaining the difference between the ad hoc vs. habitual interpretations either solely on the non-verbal predicate, by postulating an event variable in their lexical layer (see Kratzer 1995; Adger and Ramchand 2003; Magri 2009; Roy 2013), or solely on the copular or non-copular primary predicate, which contains an aspectual operator or an incorporated abstract preposition, responsible for such interpretive differences (Schmitt 2005, Schmitt and Miller 2007, Gallego and Uriagereka 2009, 2011, Marín 2010, Camacho 2012). The present proposal combines Maienborn’s (2003, 2005a,b, 2011) discourse-semantic theory of copular sentences with Richardson’s (2001, 2007) analysis of non-verbal adjunct predicates in Russian, based on alternative states. Under this combined account, variation between the ad hoc vs. habitual interpretations of non-verbal predicates is derived from the presence or absence of a modal OPalt operator that can bind the temporal variable of non-verbal predicates in accessible worlds, in the sense of Kratzer (1991). In the absence of this operator, the temporal variable is bound by the T0 head in the standard way. The proposal extends to non-verbal predicates in copular sentences as well as to argument and adjunct non-verbal predicates in non-copular sentences.
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    Selected aspects of amount relatives: The Romanian-English connection
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2015) Grosu, Alexander; Giurgea, Ion
    The inter-related goals of this paper are: (i) To contribute to a better understanding of the semantic and morphological properties of amount relatives in Romanian, (ii) to compare and contrast these constructions with their English counterparts, and (iii) to bring into bolder relief than has so far been done in the literature the fact that amount relatives in general are compatible not only with an amount denotation of the complex DPs that contain them, but with an entity denotation as well.