ECM across a CP in Korean poses difficulties from the standpoint of the locality of A-movement/agreement. A phase-based analysis is developed which requires two steps: (i) in the embedded CP, VP/vP containing its VP-internal subject first moves to Spec-CP, which renders the subject accessible to the matrix v, in accordance with Chomsky's Phase Impenetrability Condition; (ii) ECM takes place in ...

Introduction There has long been an intuition that the subject position is deeply relevant to information structural concerns cross-linguistically, particularly because they frequently appear at the left edge of a clause, which is thought to be associated with given/topical information (cf. Vallduvi 1992). This raises interesting questions about the role of the passive construction in the disco...

In this paper, based on Chinese data, I propose that the so called light verb construction can be subsumed under the analysis of internal topicalization, following the analysis of remnant movement. First, I argue that a light verb does assign theta-roles. Second, I argue that all the particular syntactic behaviors observed in Grimshaw and Mester (1988) the verbal noun cannot undergo topicalizat...

An excellent example of a phenomenon bridging a lexicon and a grammar is provided by grammaticalized alternations (e.g., passivization, reflexivity, and reciprocity): these alternations represent productive grammatical processes which are, however, lexically determined. While grammaticalized alternations keep lexical meaning of verbs unchanged, they are usually characterized by various changes ...

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the aspectual properties of middle constructions in English. English middle constructions are non-eventive sentences deno ting a property of the grammatical subject. Middle formation seems to have certain similarities with passivization as both processes involve demotion or deletion of the external argument and promotion of the internal argument to...

Translating Japanese to English is difficult because they belong to different language families. Naı̈ve phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) often fails to address syntactic difference between Japanese and English. Preordering methods are one of the simple but effective approaches that can model reordering in a long distance, which is crucial in translating Japanese and English. Th...

In order to identify the basic properties of PoRs and the theoretical questions that follow, consider the German active-passive pair in (3a, b) involving the reflexive use of the verb ‘waschen’ (to wash). As in ordinary passives, the lexical verb in (3b) appears as passive participle and the passive auxiliary werden (to become) is used. The external argument disappears (but it can reappear in a...

The valency behavior (argument structure) of lexical items is so varied that it cannot be described by general rules and must be captured in lexicons separately for each lexical item. For verbs, lexicons typically describe only unmarked usage—the active form—while natural languages allow for certain regular changes in the number, type and/or realization of complementations (e.g. passivization)....