Gradient auxiliary selection and impersonal passivization in German: An experimental investigation  

Oleh:

Sorace, Antonella ; Keller, Frank

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Linguistics (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST & JSTOR) vol. 29 no. 1 (Mar. 2003), page 57-86.
Fulltext: gradient.pdf (365.64KB)

Isi artikel

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic re¯exes of split intransitivity in German ± the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction ± are sensitive to an aspectual}thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between `core' verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and `intermediate' verbs that exhibit gradience. Furthermore, crossdialectal differences between northern and southern German with respect to auxiliary selection tend to occur only with intermediate verbs. We argue that these ®ndings lend support to the view that the unaccusative}unergative distinction is considerably more unstable than often assumed, and suggest that projectionist theories of the lexicon-syntax interface such as those directly derived from the Unaccusative Hypothesis may not be able to account for the systematic variation exhibited by the data.

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