Delia Bentley

Auxiliary selection and the semantics of unaccusativity

Abstract Our focus in this paper is on those Romance and Germanic languages which exhibit alternation of ‘have’ and ‘be’ (‘auxiliary selection’) according to verb class. In these closely related languages ‘have’ occurs with transitives and unergatives, while ‘be’ occurs to varying degrees with unaccusatives. Crucially, the distribution of perfective ‘have’ and ‘be’ is structured within and across languages. Following Sorace [J. French Lang. Stud. 3 (1993) 71; Language 76 (2000) 859], we take the systematic variation in auxiliary selection to suggest that ‘unaccusativity’ is determined by a semantic notion whose components are organised along a typicality scale ranging from core to periphery. By pinpointing the semantic properties which are part of unaccusativity (the components of the scale), we seek to establish how they are combined and how the subsets of combined properties are ordered. On the basis of synchronic and diachronic evidence from a variety of languages with auxiliary alternation according to verb class we analyze perfective auxiliaries as morphosyntactic markers of tense and aspect. We conclude that these elements are realised by a morphological rule sensitive to the semantics of predicates. It is implicit in our account that analyses postulating a deterministic correspondence between perfective ‘have’ and an external argument fail to capture the crosslinguistic variation in auxiliary selection.

Ne-cliticisation and split intransitivity

I consider a number of constructions with ne-cliticisation, which at first sight would seem to be problematic vis-a-vis the hypothesis that the Italian partitive clitic ne is a diagnostic of unaccusativity. Structures with ne-cliticisation can receive an existential interpretation in sentence focus. I argue that, in the putatively non-canonical domains, ne realises the argument of a stage-level existential predicate (see Carlson I977; Diesing I992; Pustejovsky I995), which is not spelled out in syntax, but only figures in the semantic representation of the sentence. My findings highlight the role of focus structure in unaccusativity phenomena (see Van Valin I993a; Levin & Rappaport Hovav I995; Lambrecht 2000; among others), and support the analysis of split intransitivity in terms of non-deterministic correspondence between discourse, semantics and syntax.

Existentials and locatives in Romance dialects of Italy

List of figures and tables List of abbreviations Dialect maps 1. Existentials and locatives in Romance dialects of Italy: Introduction 2. Focus structure 3. Predication and argument realization 4. Definiteness effects and linking 5. Historical context 6. Conclusion Appendix 1: Early Romance sources Appendix 2: Latin sources References Index