On the argumenthood of optional PPs with Italian motion verbs
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2019/10/0011/000373Keywords:
argumenthood, acceptability judgments, motion verbs, Italian, syntaxAbstract
In this study, we investigated the argumenthood of locative PPs occurring with motion verbs in Italian, by means of a behavioral experiment based on the traditional optionality test for argumenthood. Previous research relied on linguists’ intuitions or corpus frequencies, and to our knowledge no published research on motion verbs in Italian has employed a behavioral experiment yet. Consistently with recent literature, we show that the optional PPs occurring with each motion verb have different argumenthood scores on a gradient scale depending on the interaction between their Aktionsart and morphosyntactic class. We observed that achievements occur with adjuncts, activities with in-between constituents, accomplishments either with arguments or with adjuncts depending on their auxiliary in compound tenses.
References
Cennamo, M., Lenci, A. 2018. Gradience in Subcategorization? Locative Phrases with Italian Verbs of Motion. Studia Linguistica, 1–29.
Folli, R. 2001. Two strategies to construct Telicity: A comparative analysis of English and Italian. Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, 47.
Garnier, S. 2018. viridis: Default Color Maps from 'matplotlib'. R package version 0.5.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=viridis
Grimshaw, J. 1990. Argument structure. The MIT Press.
Kim, N., Rawlins, K., Van Durme, B., Smolensky, P. 2018. Predicting the Argumenthood of English Prepositional Phrases. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07889
Levin, B., Rappaport Hovav, M. 2008. Lexicalized manner and result are in complementary distribution. IATL, 26–27.
Nam, S. 2004. Goal and Source: Their Syntactic and Semantic Asymmetry. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 301.
R Core Team 2019. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.
Sorace, A. 2000. Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs. Language, 859–890.
Vater, H. 1978. On the possibility of distinguishing between complements and adjuncts. Valence, Semantic Case and Grammatical Relations, 1, 21–45.
Wickham, H. 2016. ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer-Verlag New York.
Wilke, C. O. 2018. ggridges: Ridgeline Plots in 'ggplot2'. R package version 0.5.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggridges
Williams, A. 2015. Arguments in Syntax and Semantics.
Zubizarreta, M. L., Oh, E. 2007. On the syntactic composition of manner and motion. The MIT Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
