Cover not available
Part of
Atypical predicate-argument relations
Edited by Thierry Ruchot and Pascale Van Praet
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 33] 2016
► pp. 3–26

Verbs of pain and accusative subjects in Romanian

| Ghent University x Contragram

Verbs of pain in Romanian such as durea ‘ache’, ustura ‘burn’, and furnica ‘itch’ assign the accusative to their experiencer arguments, unlike other Romance languages, where the experiencer is dative-marked. The use of the accusative raises interesting problems in that it gives rise to a mismatch between the hypothesis on the syntax of inalienability in Romance in Generative Grammar (Guéron 1985) on the one hand and Burzio’s (1986) Generalization on the other hand. This article shows that the inversed nominative NP denoting the body part does not show subject properties, and that the accusative experiencer in sentence initial position does not show object properties, but instead displays subject properties, just like the dative in similar constructions. However, the difference between accusative and dative subjects in this construction is that the accusative is assigned to verb arguments and is a lexical case, whereas the dative is assigned to external possessors and is an inherent case. Surprisingly, the argument status of the accusative experiencer makes it even more subject-like than the dative experiencer, which is an adjunct and is dependent on the presence of an internal argument triggering verb agreement, whereas the accusative subject can also occur without an internal argument or with a locative PP.

Published online: 8 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.33.01van
References
Barnes, Michael
1986 Subject, nominative and oblique case in faroese. Scripta Islandica 37. 13–46.Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana & Luigi Rizzi
1988 Psych-verbs and theta theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6. 291–352. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bennis, Hans
2004 Unergative adjectives and psych verbs. In A. Artemis, E. Anagnostopoulou, & M. Everaert (eds.), The unaccusativity puzzle. Explorations of the syntax-lexicon interface, 84–113. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Anastassia, Ekaterina V. Rakhilina & Tatiana I. Reznikova
2007 Conceptualization of pain: A database for lexical typology. In P. Bosch, D. Gabelaia, & J. Lang (eds.), TbiLLC 2007, LNAI, 110–123. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.Google Scholar
Bossong, Georg
1998 Le marquage de l’expérient dans les langues de l’Europe. In J. Feuillet (ed.), Actance et valence dans les langues de l’Europe, 259–294. Berlin/New York: Mouton/de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Burzio, Luigi
1981 Intransitive verbs and italian auxiliaries. Ph.D. diss. MIT.Google Scholar
1986 Italian syntax: A Government binding approach. Dordrecht: Reidel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000 Anatomy of a generalization. In E. Reuland Eric (ed.), Arguments and case. Explaining burzio’s generalization, 195–240. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1986 Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cilianu-Lascu, Corina
2006 O mănâncă limba/la langue lui démange. Quelques remarques sur la place du sujet dans les structures possessives en roumain et en français, Enonciation et syntaxe. Recherches ACLIF: Actes du Séminaire de Didactique Universitaire, Association des Chercheurs en Linguistique Française 3. 51–69.Google Scholar
Guéron, Jacqueline
1983 L’emploi possessif de l’article français. Langue française 58. 23–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1985 Inalienable possession, pro-inclusion and lexical chains. In J. Guéron, H. Obenauer, & J.-Y. Pollock (eds.), Grammatical representation, 43–86. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
2003 Inalienable possession and the interpretation of determiners. In M. Coene Martine & Y. D’hulst (eds.), The expression of possession in noun phrases. From NP to DP, Vol. II, 189–220. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 Inalienable possession. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds.), The blackwell companion to syntax, 589–638. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Haider, Hubert
2000 The license to license: Licensing of structural case plus economy yields burzio’s generalization. In E. Reuland (ed.), Arguments and case. Explaining burzio’s generalization, 31–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin
2001 Non-canonical marking of core arguments in European languages. In A. Aikhenvald, Y. Alexandra, R.M.W. Dixon, & M. Onishi (eds.), Non-canonical marking of subjects and objects, 53–83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herschensohn, Julia
1992 French inalienable binding. In C. Laeufer & T.A. Morgan (eds.), Theoretical analyses in romance linguistics, 367–384. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Junker, Marie-Odile, & France Martineau
1987 Les possessions inaliénables dans les constructions objet. Revue romane 22. 194–209.Google Scholar
Kleiber, Georges
1999 Anaphore associative et relation partie-tout: condition d’aliénation et principe de congruence ontologique. Langue française 122. 70–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
König, Ekkehard, & Martin Haspelmath
1998 Les constructions à possesseur externe dans les langues d’Europe. In J. Feuillet (éd.), Actance et valence dans les langues d’Europe, 525–606. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marantz, Alec
2000 Case and licensing. In Reuland Eric (ed.), Arguments and case. Explaining Burzio’s generalization, 11–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perlmutter, David M
1978 Impersonal passive and the unaccusative hypothesis. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 4) , 159–189.
Perlmutter, David M. & John Moore
2002 Language-Internal explanation: The distribution of Russian impersonals. Language 78. 373–416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reuland, Eric
(ed.) 2000a Arguments and case. Explaining Burzio’s generalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000b Explaining Burzio’s generalization: Exploring the issues. In E. Reuland (ed.), Arguments and case. Explaining Burzio’s generalization, 1–10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Riegel, Martin
1994 Article défini, anaphore intra-phrastique et relations partie-tout. In C. Schnedecker, et al. (eds.), L’anaphore associative (Aspects linguistiques, psycholinguistiques et automatiques), 233–250. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Schnedecker, Catherine, Charolles Michel, Kleiber Georges & David Jean
(eds.) 1994 L’anaphore associatiave (Aspects linguistiques, psycholinguistiques et automatiques). Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Şerbănescu, Andra
1999 Dativ posesiv, dativ experimentator. Studii şi cercetări lingvistice L, 1. 19–38.Google Scholar
Seržant, Ilja A
2013 Rise of canonical objecthood with the Lithuanian verbs of pain. Baltic Linguistics 4. 187–211.Google Scholar
Smith, Henry
1994 “Dative sickness” in Germanic. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 12. 675–736. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spanoghe, Anne-Marie
1995 La syntaxe de l’appartenance inaliénable en français, en espagnol et en portugais. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Van Peteghem, Marleen
2006a Le datif en français: un cas structural. Journal of French Languages Studies 16. 93–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006b Anaphores associatives intra-phrastiques et inaliénabilité. In M. Riegel, C. Schnedecker, P. Swiggers, & I. Tamba (eds.), Aux carrefours du sens. Hommages offerts à Georges Kleiber pour son 60e anniversaire, 441–456. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar
Vergnaud, Jean-Roger & María Luisa Zubizaretta
1992 The definite determiner and the inalienable construction in French and English. Linguistic Inquiry 23. 595–652.Google Scholar
Woolford, Ellen
2003 Burzio’s generalization, markedness, and locality constraints on nominative objects. In E. Brandner & H. Zinsmeister (eds.), New perspectives on case theory, 299–327. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
2006 Lexical case, inherent case, and argument structure. Linguistic Inquiry 37(1). 111–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar