Event-structure and individuation in impersonal passives

Beatrice Primus | University of Cologne

This paper discusses the event-structural effects of suppressing the subject argument in impersonal passives in several languages, including German, Dutch and Turkish. Corpus data partially support earlier assumptions that the situation denoted by impersonal passives is a homogenoeus, e.g. atelic, event. Contrary to some of the earlier proposals, telic (or unaccusative) verb lexemes can be used in the impersonal passive if they are forced into event-structural homogeneity. I will attempt to derive this event-structural restriction from the referential demotion of the subject argument. In this view, the telicity restriction is not a strict independent constraint but rather an epiphenomenon of the referential non-individuation of the argument undergoing a change of state.

Published online: 17 November 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.166.09pri

Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Ackema, Peter & Antonella Sorace

2017. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition, ► pp. 1 ff.

Müller, Gereon

2017. Structure removal: An argument for feature-driven Merge. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2:1

Rovai, Francesco

2019. In Historical Linguistics 2015 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 348], ► pp. 188 ff.

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