PURPOSE Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia produce sentences word by word without advanced plan...

This paper focusses on the English adjectival resultative construction, as exempliied in examples (1)-(4). (1) John hammered the metal at. (2) The river froze solid. (3) The dog barked itself hoarse. (4) The dog barked the neighbours awake. Result predication occurs with both transitive and intransitive verbs. In the transitive case, the result state is predicated of the object (1). For intrans...

This paper discusses the status of Italian and Serbian clitic reflexives and reciprocals with respect to the phenomenon of split intransitivity. Assuming an analyses that treats clitics as non-argumental markers of the verb’s derived intransitivity, numerous proposals have been put forward as to whether clitic reflexives and reciprocals are unaccusative or unergative. The issue still appears as...

Verb-initial ordering may be derived by fronting the VP (or a larger constituent) to a specifier position higher than the subject. For VSO languages, this analysis requires that the object raise out of the VP to a position below the subject before the (remnant) VP fronts to the higher position. This paper builds a comprehensive analysis of VSO order in the Polynesian language Samoan, employing ...

The present paper focuses on the Mandarin Intransitive keflexive Verbs. These verbs, such as zi-sha 'to commit suicide', and zi fen 'to burn oneself, are formed with a reflexive morpheme zi-'self' and a root verb. Take the verb zi-sha 'to commit suicide' for example, the reflexive morpheme contributes the reflexive meaning and the root verb sha 'to kill' contributes the meaning`to kill'; hence,...

SV sentences with unaccusative verbs like The leaf fell involve movement from object to subject position. This line of studies tested whether young children can produce this movement and whether they represent SV sentences with unaccusatives as derived by movement. In Hebrew, unaccusatives appear in both SV and VS orders. This optionality allows for the testing of the acquisition of object-to-s...

“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 “a...

1 Current approaches Over the last fteen years, following Perlmutter and Postal's work (1983), there has been constant interest in the problem raised by transitivity alternations. In their work Perlmutter and Postal argued that the single argument of intransitive verbs may either be generated as an object of the verb (unaccusative verbs) or as a subject (unergative verbs) (cf. Bassac, 1997). A ...