Passives and Middles in Mainland Scandinavian

Microvariation Through Exponency

Antonio Fábregas, Michael T. Putnam

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110670936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This monograph explores the properties of passive and middle voice constructions in Norwegian and Swedish, concentrating on the linguistic variation related to these two constructions in Mainland Scandinavian. At an empirical level, we provide a detailed discussion of the morphosyntax and semantics of the two main types of passives in both languages, lexical (s-) and periphrasitic (bli-) passives. At a theoretical level, we propose an architecture of the language faculty where exponents play a central role. Exponents are selected to identify the structures generated by the grammar and provide a platform that make these units interpretable by the sensori-motor and conceptual-intentional interfaces. Exponents this play an essential role in determining the well-formedness of linguistic structures. We demonstrate how different syntactic structures identified and lexicalized by exponents in these two languages are capable of capturing the microvariation observed in the voice systems of these two languages in a straightforward way. The amount of linguistic information (i.e., aspect and mood) identified by each exponent in each language determines the types of complements and specifiers that can be integrated into and lexicalized by a given exponent. Although our approach shares certain affinities with other neo-constructionist approaches, a novel proposal we advance in this book is that exponents are housed in an intermediate level of structure that exists between the narrow syntax and its external interfaces. This exponency-level (?-structure) allows for a more parsimonious theoretical analysis that does not sacrifice descriptive adequacy.

1 Introduction – Prospects of an exponency-based syntax

The purpose of this book is to deliver a detailed analysis of passives and middle voice constructions in Norwegian and Swedish, according to which we derive passives and actives from the same set of syntactic heads, that is, without the use of distinct flavors of Voice-projections. Less attention is paid to anticausative constructions, although we will also address them in this monograph (cf. chapter 6), pointing the way to a more detailed analysis of these constructions in future work.

Agreeing with Solstad & Lyngfelt (2006: 2), “as has become increasingly evident the last few decades, agent demotion and voice concern more than just passivization.” This is a survey of passives and middle voice constructions in Norwegian and Swedish. We hereafter, and throughout the remainder of this book, will refer to these structures as agent-demotion constructions, or ADCs, including under this term also the anticausative structures which will receive much less attention –see chapter 6–. In this monograph, we explore the challenges of analyzing these individual, yet obviously closely related, constructions as a unified set. Although previous research from a specific theoretical perspective has made allusions to the connections across ADCs in a given language family (see e.g. Schäfer 2008: Chapter 6 for his suggestion that middle voice constructions in German with a generic interpretation can be treated as “voiced anticausatives”), to date, to the best of our knowledge, a detailed comparative treatment of ADCs in closely related languages is surprisingly lacking. This work bridges this gap, providing a detailed examination of two closely related Mainland Scandinavian languages, while exposing the impact that these empirical findings will have on any unified treatment of ADCs cross-linguistically irrespective of the theoretical framework employed.

Although they share many other morphosyntactic and semantic similarities, our previous work (Fábregas & Putnam 2013) has shown that Norwegian and Swedish employ both shared, and at the same time, unique strategies in lexicalizing ADCs that on many occasion differ quite starkly from one another. One of the key challenges in front us is to gain a more enhanced understanding of the differences in these lexicalization strategies, and of equal importance, how these differences in a unified treatment of ADCs affect not only our analysis of Norwegian and Swedish, but how they can also be extended to studies involving other typologically-similar and -diverse languages.

Our focus on ADCs in Norwegian and Swedish has much to bear on the treatment of grammatical voice in recent theoretical work (Kratzer 1996, Kural 1998, Collins 2005, Ahn & Sailor 2010), and subsequently on the cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty. In this work we adopt a generative grammar where the syntax consists of a series of functional heads (fseq) without a pre-syntactic lexicon (Borer, 2005, 2013; Starke, 2009, 2011; Baunaz et al., 2018). The universal structure of this spine of functional heads (see related proposals by Ramchand & Svenonius, 2014 and Wiltschko, 2014, 2016, 2017) results in a highly unspecified syntax when compared with previous instantiations of generative theorizing (see Boeckx, 2014). The principled goal of syntactic derivations under this view is to produce exponents, which function as an intermediary to make derivational units produced in the syntax legible for interpretation at the Sensori-Motor and Conceptual-Intentional interfaces. We review the properties of these theoretical revisions in Chapter 2.

1.1 The main empirical facts

Both Norwegian and Swedish exhibit passive voice constructions that are morphological (i.e. only involving the bound lexical s-exponent at the end of the verb, cf. 1) and syntactic (i.e. those consisting of an auxiliary verb + a past participle/supine verb, cf. 2) forms:

(1)

a.

Dette må kaste-s bort.

Norwegian

b.

Detta	måste	kasta-s	bort.	Swedish
This	must	throw.pass...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction – Prospects of an exponency-based syntax
• 2 The necessity of exponents and the nature of Ʃ-structure
• 3 Norwegian and Swedish passives: empirical facts
• 4 Deconstructing Norwegian and Swedish passives
• 5 Differences in the expression of middles in Norwegian and Swedish
• 6 Extensions: anticausatives, reciprocal uses, and additional properties of exponents
• References
• Index