Upcoming poster presentation by Lefteris Paparounas at NELS 53 on 13 January, 2023: Phrasal layering versus complex heads: Evidence from Greek stative passives.
Abstract: Many syntactic approaches to stative passives (e,g. 'the door is opened') employ phrasal layering: under these analyses, stative passives effectively have the verbal substructure of eventive passives (e.g. 'the door was opened at 3pm'), from which they are differentiated only by a stativizing layer. Greek has been widely taken to support such analyses, owing to the observation that agent-oriented modifiers, taken to diagnose a VoiceP layer, occur freely in stative passives formed with the stativizer –men–. We establish a range of novel generalizations pointing to wide-ranging mismatches between the structures of stative and eventive passives in Greek. We argue that these mismatches provide evidence against phrasal layering, supporting instead a complex head approach to stative passives whereby there is no phrasal structure below the stativizer.