Non-nominal arguments and transitivity in Romance and Scandinavian

Forfattere

Anna Pineda
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Michelle Sheehan
Anglia Ruskin University

Synopsis

This squib considers the notion of objecthood and its relation to transitivity in a number of Romance and Scandinavian languages and argues that it does not easily reduce to the notion of being nominal. The Romance data come from the faire-infinitive in Catalan and Italian, where dative causees are found only where the embedded predicate is transitive. The Scandinavian data are from pseudo-passives and expletive-associate constructions, both of which are also sensitive to transitivity. In these contexts, in addition to DPs, (non-nominalised) CPs and PPs can count for transitivity, though this is subject to variation across languages. These patterns present challenges for approaches to objecthood and transitivity based on case/Case, both traditional analyses and more recent dependent case approaches, both of which afford a privileged status to nominals.

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Publiceret

7 december 2019