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Beyond Emotions in Language: Psychological verbs at the interfaces
Edited by Bożena Rozwadowska and Anna Bondaruk
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 263] 2020
► pp. 245–318

Chapter 7
Polish impersonal middles with a dative as syntactically derived experience events

| Jagiellonian University in Kraków

Polish episodic impersonals featuring a (transitive) agentive verb in the imperfective aspect, an overt dative argument understood to be (coreferential with) the Agent of the activity event denoted by VP, an adverb like łatwo ‘easily’ or a PP like z przyjemnością ‘with pleasure’ and the (formally) reflexive się ‘SE’, are argued here to be impersonal middles expressing experiential evaluation of specific VP-events. The property of the VP-event expressed with the evaluative adverbial is parametrized to the dative argument, an Experiencer, which is added to VP by an applicative head together with the adverbial. The Agent is not present, as the experience event that arises when the applicative head adds an Experiencer to an agentive VP cannot license agentive Voice. The absence of the Agent is encoded with się ‘SE’, a lexical A-expletive devoid of φ-features and the feature of case in the specifier of a null non-thematic middle voice head. Polish episodic impersonals with a dative Experiencer provide evidence that evaluative impersonal middles need not be generic and stative and that they need not be based on unergative verbs. Accusative case is assigned to the verb’s internal argument in violation of Burzio’s Generalization (BG), showing that BG is not a syntactic universal.

Keywords: experience event, dative experiencer, subjectivity, judge-dependent evaluative adverbial, agency verbalizer, middle Voice, lexical A-expletive (reflexive) SE, Burzio’s Generalization, accusative case assignment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: DIMs in prior minimalist approaches
    • 2.1The Involuntary State Construction (Rivero 2003, et seq.)
    • 2.2DIMs as personal middles with an applied dative benefactive (Krzek, 2013)
    • 2.3Interim conclusion
  • 3.Polish DIMs: Basic facts and assumptions
    • 3.1Is there a syntactically represented implicit Agent in DIMs?
    • 3.2The source of the agentive “flavor” of DIMs
    • 3.3The adverbial within and beyond the DIM construction
    • 3.4The syntactic status of the dative constituent in DIMs
  • 4.DIMs as syntactically derived experience events
    • 4.1 Experiencer argument in the absence of an (overt) lexical Experiencer predicate
      • 4.1.1The non-selected dative Experiencer as an argument of a null Experiencer verb
      • 4.1.2The non-selected Experiencer as an argument of a null syntactic head
    • 4.2 The syntactic decomposition of Polish DIMs: The verb/VP, the dative argument, and the adverbial
    • 4.3The syntactic decomposition of Polish DIMs: Voice, (un)expected accusative, and default verbal agreement
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.263.07wil
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