The diachrony of complex predicates

Complex Predicates in Dutch Synchrony and Diachrony

The Interlanguage of Persian Learners of Italian: a Focus on Complex Predicates

This paper aims at investigating the acquisition of Italian complex predicates by native speakers of Persian. Complex predication is not as pervasive a phenomenon in Italian as it is in Persian. Yet Italian native speakers use complex predicates productively; spontaneous data show that Persian learners of Italian seem to be perfectly aware of Italian complex predicates and use this familiar fea...

Constructing Spanish Complex Predicates

Abeillé and Godard (2007) describe a variety of Spanish whose complex predicates differ structurally from the more familiar flat VP type of complex predicate common to other varieties of Spanish and Romance. I present a verb cluster analysis of this variety which both captures these structural differences, and at the same time preserves those features that are common across both construction ty...

Complex Predicates in Arrernte

Using the example of Murrinh-Patha, Seiss (2011) illustrates how Australian Aboriginal languages can shed light on the morphology-syntax interface: one aspect of their polysynthetic nature is that information often encoded in phrases and clauses in other languages is instead found in a single morphological word. In this paper, we look at another instance, the Australian Aboriginal language Arre...

Complex Predicates in Focus

Persian and Turkish exhibit a number of striking similarities: (a) many verbal concepts are expressed by complex predicates (CPr), consisting of a non-verbal (NV) element and a light verb (LV) (Foli et al 2005, Megerdoomian 2002, Kornfilt 2003), (b) both languages exhibit scrambling, and (c) they both mark direct objects for specificity (Karimi 2005, Enc 1991). However, there are also some impo...