This paper takes as its starting point the striking and systematic variation in the expression of direct objects in English, Swedish and German with respect to verbs of surface contact like ‘kick’. While in English, kick can easily appear with an inanimate object as in kick the door, in Swedish and German the corresponding sentence must be expressed using a preposition. We propose that this difference between the languages reduces to an independent difference in the presence or absence of a null particle Atloc of central coincidence. Concentrating on the comparison between English and Swedish, we argue that this small difference in the availability of a lexical item has consequences for a range of different, apparently unrelated constructions across the languages. In addition, we argue for the central role of animacy in both languages in mediating the ability of an argument to appear in direct object positions interpreted as affected.
Kizilkaya, Semra, Zarina Levy-Forsythe & Klaus von Heusinger
2022. Affectedness and Differential Object Marking in Turkish and Uzbek. Linguistics 60:6 ► pp. 1907 ff.
Fleischhauer, Jens
2018. Graduierung nicht skalarer Verben. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 46:2 ► pp. 221 ff.
Beavers, John
2017. TheSpray/LoadAlternation. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition, ► pp. 1 ff.
Lundquist, Björn & Gillian Ramchand
2013. Objects as locations in English and Mainland Scandinavian. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 16:2-3 ► pp. 159 ff.
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