Mark Volpe: Unaccusatives and special meaning (reply to Heidi Harley)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi Listers,
    This is a very belated response, but, I think like
many others, I just assumed that Inchoatives were
embedded under Lexical Causatives. I think Heidi has
been able to tease out a valid explanation for that
assumption.
    The reason I raise this now is that I've recently
been looking at Reduced Causatives (RC) and their
interaction with unaccusatives. Notice that in
non-agentive RCs the principle exponent is identical
to that of the passive, e.g., 'I had my car stolen'
and 'My car was stolen'. I'm trying to tease out
whether unaccusatives embedded under RC are in fact
unaccusatives or passives or perhaps both, e.g., 'I
had the suitcase opened on me'. With a by-marked Agent
it's unambiguously passive, but is it ever
unaccusative? Any thoughts?
    A perhaps interesting theoretical aspect is that
some unaccusatives ae formed by passive morphology,
e.g., Turkish, which also has only RCs. RCs seem to
despise passive morphology and Turkish unaccusatives
formed with passives must eliminate the passive
morpheme to appear in RC. The same question about
interpretation as posed above arises; passive or
unaccusative?
     You can see similar behaviour in English when the
extended exponence of passive is embedded, e.g., *'I
had my suitcase be opened.' RCs don't like it!
                     Mark

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo!
http://sbc.yahoo.com