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Gradient auxiliary selection and impersonal passivization in German: an experimental investigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2003

FRANK KELLER  and
ANTONELLA SORACE
FRANK KELLER
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh Author's address: Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems, Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, U.K. E-mail: keller@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
ANTONELLA SORACE
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh Author's address: Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LL, U.K. E-mail: antonella@ling.ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic reflexes of split intransitivity in German – the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction – are sensitive to an aspectual/thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between ‘core’ verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and ‘intermediate’ verbs that exhibit gradience. Furthermore, crossdialectal differences between northern and southern German with respect to auxiliary selection tend to occur only with intermediate verbs. We argue that these findings lend support to the view that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is considerably more unstable than often assumed, and suggest that projectionist theories of the lexicon-syntax interface such as those directly derived from the Unaccusative Hypothesis may not be able to account for the systematic variation exhibited by the data.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 57 - 108
Copyright
2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank Ash Asudeh, Maria Lapata, Géraldine Legendre, Janet Randall, Mark Steedman and Angeliek van Hout for comments and discussions regarding this paper. We have also benefited from presenting some of this material at the University of Manchester and at MIT. We would like to acknowledge the feedback of three anonymous referees for Journal of Linguistics, which has significantly improved this paper. All remaining errors are, of course, our own.