(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 ...

Verfasser: Mara van Schaik-Rădulescu
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
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
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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).