26.1134, Diss: Syntax: Irwin: 'Unaccusativity at the Interfaces'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1134. Fri Feb 27 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1134, Diss: Syntax: Irwin: 'Unaccusativity at the Interfaces'

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Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2015 23:56:13
From: Patricia Irwin [irwp.ling at gmail.com]
Subject: Unaccusativity at the Interfaces

 
Institution: New York University 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Patricia Irwin

Dissertation Title: Unaccusativity at the Interfaces 

Dissertation URL:  http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001617

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax


Dissertation Director(s):
Richard S. Kayne
Alec Marantz
Chris Barker

Dissertation Abstract:

In standard generative approaches, the central component of the grammar is the
syntax. Syntax builds the structure of a sentence, and, at a certain point of
structure-building, a syntactic object is sent to the two other components of
the grammar: the semantic component, where meaning is computed, and the
phonological/modality component, where the syntactic object is given form in
sound. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the ways in which
syntactic structure has effects at the interfaces with syntax. It does so by
focusing on unaccusativity, defined as a syntactic configuration in which a
sentence has no external argument and a single VP-internal argument requiring
structural case. This working definition of unaccusativity picks out two
structural “direct object”  positions. The syntactic analysis in the
dissertation argues that the two resulting types of VPs correspond to two
well-known classes of unaccusative predicates: those that denote changes of
state (e.g., break, freeze), and those that denote motion and existence (e.g.,
arrive, drive up). This part of the dissertation discusses English
unaccusativity diagnostics with respect to these two structures. Drawing on
event-based approaches to argument structure, I argue that an agreement
relationship between an event-introducing v head and the internal argument has
consequences for the strong/weak determination of voice (or little-v, in a
Chomskyan system) further along in the derivation. Turning to the interfaces,
I argue that the two types of unaccusative structures have different
properties at the interpretive interface. I argue that these differences are
seen in the establishment of new discourse referents in English. My analysis
starts from a long-standing observation in the functional literature: new
discourse referents tend to occur as transitive direct objects rather than as
subjects. I propose that transitive sentences allow existential closure at the
VP level (over a direct object), only in the context of a predication, where a
predication is defined as a semantically asymmetrical relationship between two
phrases. I argue that this mechanism is available in only one type of
unaccusative configuration. In other words, only one structural type of
unaccusative sentence can establish a new discourse referent in the same way
that a transitive sentence can. This argument is supported by a corpus study
that compares the occurrence of old and new “subjects” of unaccusative and
unergative predicates in a subset of the Switchboard Corpus that was
independently annotated for NP information status. Turning to unaccusativity
at the syntax-phonology interface, I show that the distribution of prosodic
prominence in all-new unaccusative sentences of both structural types differs
from that of all-new unergative sentences. Drawing on recent phase-based
accounts of the syntax-prosody interface, I argue that both types of
unaccusative VPs are selected for by a voice head that does not trigger
spellout and that results in just one domain for accent assignment in all-new
sentences. The presence of strong voice (Chomskyan v*) in unergative sentences
results in either one or two domains for prosodic prominence in all-new
unergative sentences. These differences are supported by an experiment in
which participants pronounced all-new unergative and unaccusative sentences.
The results of the production study support long-standing claims in the
theoretical literature that all-new unergative and unaccusative sentences are
pronounced differently.




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