The processability account anticipates that learners will make more underpassivization errors than overpassivization since passivization entails processing. Although one study on psych-verbs and a few unaccusatives examined Turkish L2 learners’ acquisition, no research compared single set of acquisitions these verbs together from processing point view. In this regard, the current aims to invest...

Itamar Kastner (NYU) 1. The focus of this paper is the nonactive Hebrew verbal template hitpa'el, in which three root consonants are arranged in the basic form hitXaYYeZ (citation form, M.SG). In this kind of rootand-pattern morphology, the middle consonant is geminated, the root is prefixed with hitand certain vowels are inserted. HitXaYYeZ verbs are never transitive; empirically, I explain th...

Passive and impersonal constructions have a strikingly different status in current theoretical and descriptive studies. All formal approaches recognize passive constructions and provide some means of relating their properties to those of corresponding actives. Any framework that did not would be considered fundamentally deficient or incomplete. Many descriptive grammars likewise apply a broad n...

In this paper I introduce some data from an aphasic patient who demonstrates a robust effect of grammatical class; he is unable to read any function words, and makes characteristic ‘within-category’ substitution errors. These errors extend to the class of unaccusative verbs, and this leads to a consideration of the functional nature of unaccusativity. Existing accounts of unaccusativity as a sy...

This is because the former are lexically implicated or entailed, and thus are more available and less expensive than the latter in the sense that they involve less practical reasoning. In addition, in terms of the strong-weak distinction, an implicational universal can be posited, namely that if a language has strong resultatives, it must have weak resultatives as well (Washio 1999, 2002). Seco...