(Non-)homogeneity in Dutch impersonal passives of unaccusatives
This paper sheds new light on the behaviour of telic predicates, particularly unaccusatives (opstijgen ‘take off’, vallen ‘fall’), in the Dutch impersonal passive (= ImpersP) construction. Using recently collected data, I show that Zaenen’s (1988, 1993) contention that Dutch ImpersPs are barred from a non-homogeneous (telic) interpretation, though generally accepted in the literature, is empirically flawed. In fact, a telic reading obtains whenever the ImpersP of a telic predicate refers to a singular event. In this case, the implicit argument receives either a singular or a collective reading... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2011 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol XIII, Iss 1, Pp 63-84 (2011) |
Verlag/Hrsg.: |
Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti
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Schlagwörter: | impersonal passive / unaccusative / telicity / event structure / implicit argument / Philology. Linguistics / P1-1091 |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28986893 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | https://doaj.org/article/661376c90543436cab1b812b5794cfdd |
This paper sheds new light on the behaviour of telic predicates, particularly unaccusatives (opstijgen ‘take off’, vallen ‘fall’), in the Dutch impersonal passive (= ImpersP) construction. Using recently collected data, I show that Zaenen’s (1988, 1993) contention that Dutch ImpersPs are barred from a non-homogeneous (telic) interpretation, though generally accepted in the literature, is empirically flawed. In fact, a telic reading obtains whenever the ImpersP of a telic predicate refers to a singular event. In this case, the implicit argument receives either a singular or a collective reading (see Landman’s (1989, 1996) theory of groups). In contrast, homogeneous ImpersPs of telic predicates assume a distributive plural event interpretation and select an argument with a distributive, bare plural-like reading. Based on a comparison with active unaccusative constructions with bare plural subjects (see Rothstein 2008a), I argue that the aspectual properties of an ImpersP predicate determine the referential properties of the argument, pace Primus (2010a and 2010b).