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 Argument Structure of Participial Clauses: The Unaccusative Phase
Asier Alcázar and Mario Saltarelli
194-205 (complete pdf)
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Past Participle Clauses (PCs) ban unergatives yet not unaccusatives, making them a long established diagnostic for the Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH, Perlmutter 1978). Notwithstanding the prominence of PCs in the unaccusative literature (Levin & Rappaport 1995, Hale & Kayser 1993), little attention has been paid to their structural analysis. Why should PCs ban unergatives? In this paper it is proposed that PCs are VP phases (Chomsky 2001), without vP, TP or CP (contra Belletti 1992), hence deriving the instrumental role of PCs in the UH.


Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 10th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium
edited by Joyce Bruhn de Garavito and Elena Valenzuela

Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-427-0 library binding
v+311 pages
publication date: 2008
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA
Printed edition: $250.00
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