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Argument structure licensing and English have1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2011

KYUMIN KIM
KYUMIN KIM*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
Author's address: Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall, 4th Floor, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, CanadaM5S 3G3kyumin.kim@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

This paper provides a unified syntactic account of the distribution of English have in causative constructions (e.g. John had Mary read a book) and experiencer constructions (e.g. John had the student walk out of his classroom). It is argued that have is realized in the context of an applicative head (Appl) and an event-introducer v, regardless of the type of v. Have is spelled out in the causative when Appl merges under vCAUSE, and in the experiencer construction when Appl merges under vBE. This proposal is extended to have in possessive constructions (e.g. John has a hat/a brother): have is realized in the context of vBE and Appl. The proposed account provides empirical evidence for expanding the distribution of Appl: (i) a causative can take ApplP as a complement, which was absent in Pylkkänen's (2008) typological classification, and (ii) Appl can merge above Voice, contrary to Pylkkänen's analysis in which Appl is argued to always merge below VoiceP, never above. Moreover, the proposed account supports the theoretical claim that argument structure is licensed by functional syntactic structure; in particular, it shows that the relevant functional heads are not aspectual heads, but Appl and v.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 71 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[1]

I am grateful to Diane Massam and Elizabeth Cowper for their valuable comments on this work. I thank Cristina Cuervo for comments on various stages of this work. I also thank Sarah Clarke for her helpful suggestions on this paper and two anonymous JL referees for insightful comments and suggestions that helped me improve the paper. All errors are of course mine alone. This research was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral fellowship 752-2009-2346 to the author, and was also partially supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant 410-2005-1112 to Diane Massam.

The following annotations are used in the glosses of non-English examples in this paper: 1, 3=first, third person; appl=applicative; aro=aroist; asp=aspect; c=common; cause=causative; dat=dative; erg=ergative; fv=final vowel; gedn=gerund; inst=instrument; nom=nominative; p=preposition; perf=perfect; pl=plural; pre=present; prev=preverb; pst=past; sb=subject; sg=singular; v=verbalizing head v.

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