The interpretive value of object splits  

Oleh:

Ritter, Elizabeth ; Rosen, Sara Thomas

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 23 no. 4-5 (2001), page 425-451.
Topik: Accusative case; Agreement; Boundedness; De®niteness; Delimitation; Direct object; Object shift; Quantization; Speci®city
Fulltext: 23_04-05_Ritter.pdf (207.31KB)

Isi artikel

The goal of this paper is to account for the observation that in a broad range of genetically unrelated languages we ®nd two classes of direct objects based on their syntactic and semantic properties. Speci®cally, we ®nd splits in object case marking, object position, or the ability of the object to trigger verb agreement. This split always correlates with speci®city or de®niteness of the object, and in a subset of languages it also correlates with delimitation or boundedness of the event. We propose that this split in object properties is determined by the presence or absence of a feature [Quantization] on the object DP. This feature, which formalizes Krifka's characterization of the countability of nominals and events, may also be present on either the verb or object agreement (Agr-O). The observed cross-linguistic variation is attributed to the language speci®c choice between these two heads as follows: When [Quant] is a feature of the verb, it is interpretable and independently encodes delimitation/boundedness of the event. However, when [Quant] is a feature of the functional head Agr, it is an uninterpretable feature which only enters into a checking relation with a de®nite/speci®c direct object.

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