1 “ Obliqueness ” as a Component of Argument Structure in Amharic
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“Obliqueness” as a Component of Argument Structure in Amharic Mark Baker Rutgers University Abstract: The purpose of this article is to show that some arguments in Amharic count as oblique as opposed to direct. Oblique arguments include the nonagentive subjects of psych verbs but not those of unaccusative verbs, the goal arguments but not the source arguments of ditransitive verbs, and extra “affectee” arguments of unaccusative verbs like ‘get lost’ and ‘die’. These oblique arguments behave differently from direct arguments when it comes to general syntactic processes such as agreement and case marking. I show that the differences cannot be explained in terms of the relative position of the arguments in the clause. Rather, I argue that oblique arguments are arguments that are the complements of a phonologically null adposition. The syntactic properties of oblique arguments can then be derived from the fact that they cannot satisfy the EPP property of Tense, with the consequence that Tense cannot agree with them. The article closes with some discussion of why only certain kinds of arguments can be obliques, why the directoblique distinction does not seem to be universal, and what implications the distinction might have for theoretical questions about whether verbs have argument structures.
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تاریخ انتشار 2011