Michela Cennamo

Late Latin Pleonastic Reflexives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis

This paper illustrates the relevance of the Unaccusative Hypothesis for a well-known area of Late Latin/early Romance syntax, the proliferation of pleonastic reflexives with intransitive verbs denoting change of state/location, states, verba dicendi and sentiendi. In particular, it is argued that at some point in Late Latin the accusative and dative reflexive pronouns (se/sibi) become markers of Split Intransitivity, with se occurring with unergative/class SA verbs, and sibi with unaccusative/class SO verbs. It is also shown that a gradient approach to Unaccusativity/Split Intransitivity accounts neatly for the data, allowing one to locate the verbs/patterns under scrutiny along a Hierarchy of Unaccusativity/Unergativity, resulting from the interplay of a number of parameters, with Telicity and Control being most relevant in defining the core of the categories.

Semantic and (morpho)syntactic constraints on anticausativization: evidence from Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic

Abstract The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb’s meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.