The 2017-2018 NYU Linguistics Colloquium series will start
this Friday with a talk by Julie Anne Legate. (Details Below)
---
Speaker: Julie Anne Legate
Date: Friday, September 22nd, 2017
Time: 3.30pm
Venue: Room 104, 10 Washington Place
*Title*: A Theory of Passives and A (Partial) Theory of
Impersonals
*Abstract*: In this talk I present evidence for an analysis
of the passive as demotion of the thematic subject, not
through a generalized head/process that demotes arguments,
but rather through existential closure applying at LF on the
Voice head that introduces the thematic subject itself.
I demonstrate that this correctly predicts that a
passive-like alternation may apply to the Appl head
that introduces the applicative object. It also correctly
predicts that the passive cannot apply to passives or to
unaccusatives. I also argue that impersonals contrast
with passives in not exhibiting argument demotion, but
rather a null impersonal pronoun; this pronoun must be
licensed by a designated functional projection. Illustrative
data come from Indonesian, Lithuanian, Sanskrit, and Turkish.
© 2024 The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania