Teaching Subject Position in Spanish: Gustar Verbs, Unaccusatives and the Impersonal Passive

The Subject Position in Spanish Nominalized Infinitives

Marcus Berger, University of Michigan 0. While much recent work has focused on various nominal and verbal properties of syntactic nominalizations, relatively little work has investigated how their internal structure is derived. Many authors adopt a ‘mixed projection’ hierarchy in which verbal projections appear interpolated into an otherwise nominal hierarchy. The resulting combination of proje...

Elliphant: A Machine Learning Method for Identifying Subject Ellipsis and Impersonal Constructions in Spanish

This thesis presents Elliphant, a machine learning system for classifying Spanish subject ellipsis as either referential or non-referential. Linguistically motivated features are incorporated in a system which performs a ternary classification: verbs with explicit subjects, verbs with omitted but referential subjects (zero pronouns), and verbs with no subject (impersonal constructions). To the ...

Passives and impersonals1

This paper argues that the term ‘passive’ has been systematically misapplied to a class of impersonal constructions that suppress the realization of a syntactic subject. The reclassification of these constructions highlights a typological contrast between two types of verbal diathesis and clarifies the status of putative ‘passives of unaccusatives ’ and ‘transitive passives’ in Balto-Finnic and...

the role of visual aids and translation in teaching vocabulary in est

the present study investigated the effect of the two vocabulary teaching techniques in est, namely the use of translation and the use of visual aids as two separate vocabulary teaching techniques. to answer the question of the study, a pretest (michigan test) was administered to the 58 randomly selected est students at khajeh nasiredin tusi university, faculty of mechanics. after the homogeneit...

The Polish passive and impersonal in Lexical Mapping Theory*