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theses

My thesis is concerned with the syntax and related syntactico-semantic properties of two types of non-overt internal arguments: generic null objects (GNO), as in His movies always shock___ , and indefinite null objects (INO), as in He reads___ / He is reading___ . Traditionally, these objects have been understood as standing at the opposite ends of a scale when it comes to their syntactic robustness. GNO were analyzed as null pronouns with an arbitrary reference that consist of a D-feature and/or a set of phi-features (Rizzi 1986, Authier 1992, Landau 2010). INO are typically analyzed as the result of lexical rules that existentially quantify over the internal argument for given predicates (Dowty 1978, Bresnan 1978, and then many others). Utilizing data from Czech, a language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology, I show that the distinction between the two types of null objects is much more subtle. GNO consist of a single syntactic node, little n, bearing just the gender feature, but no number or person features. Rather than fully-fledged pronominal DPs, GNO should be conceived as conceptually impoverished nouns (i.e. nouns that do not contain any root), where their interpretable gender feature brings about their personal, [+human]-like meaning. Semantically, these n-heads introduce a variable that gets bound by a generic operator, along the lines of Krifka et al. (1995). INO, albeit syntactically unrepresentedon their own, are derived by the generalized type-shifting iota-closure defined on a syntactic node little v (understood as a verbalizer in the sense of Marantz 2007, 2013). I show that this syntactic approach to intransitivization is the only possible option if we want to account for INO’s high productivity, their occurrence with the so-called secondary imperfectives in Slavic, and the fact that they appear only in the contexts that supply the kind/property of the existentially quantified argument (I encode INO’s contextual licensing as a presupposition for the application of the intransitivizing operation). In the final part of the dissertation, I elaborate the proposal to account for the observed incompatibility of INO with perfective, telic event denoting verbs, and these verb’s contrasting compatibility with GNO. I explain it as a result of INO’s inability to satisfy the unvalued EPP-like quantificational feature Q_Pf constituting the perfective aspectual head. The existence of Q_Pf is independently motivated by the quantificational requirements of perfective verbs in Czech, expressed in terms of a syntactic argument type or a quantificational prefix that they have to merge with (cf. Borer 2005). GNO, on the other hand, can overtly move to Spec,Asp, in accordance with their analysis as restrictors of the generic quantifier presented in the first part of the thesis.

ETD_8371

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Věra Dvořáková

doi:10.7282/T3251N9Q

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.