In this article the reasons for an argument to be chosen as sentence topic are discussed. I argue that a topic expression can be prototypical or not, depending on how its thematic/semantic properties reflect humans’ preference to talk about certain things and not others. Although subjects are mostly prototypical topics, I show that a non-subject topic is prototypical with predicates that select...

This paper argues against the view that Japanese indirect passives are restricted with respect to the base verb that they take. Specifically, it argues that, despite its initial plausibility, the oft-proposed generalization that unaccusatives cannot appear in indirect passives is too strong and the alleged distribution is a tendency at most, albeit a strong one. After closely examining the rest...

This paper provides a contrastive account of agent demotion in German and Polish. While is relatively broad term that often used including mere backgrounding, the focus on lexical morphosyntactic means allow for agents to be omitted entirely, such as different forms passive voice, reflexive constructions, generic pronouns or unaccusative verbs with impersonal subjects (among others). It argued ...

The present paper attempts to formalize the semantic interpretation of resultative phrases in Japanese in the framework of Generative Lexicon, with a focus on the semantic subject of resultative phrases, i.e. the entity which resultative phrases are predicated of. The semantic subject cannot always be identified with the direct object of transitive verbs or the subject of unaccusative verbs, as...

traditional work on pro-drop languages identified a set of parametric values ‎associated with the availability of null subjects, including the presence of null ‎expletive subjects. in the same vein, but more within the framework of minimalist ‎program, i will discuss while referential subjects may optionally be overt or covert ‎in the persian, expletives are obligatorily null. in this regard, a...

This paper investigates the Italian Word Order variation in position of subjects (S) with respect to finite predicates (V) two adult populations: L1-Italian speakers and L1-French L2-Italian speakers. We test how discourse focus (Belletti, 2001) a decomposed approach Unaccusativity, i.e., Unaccusativity Hierarchy (Sorace, 2000), determine SV/VS L1 L2 populations. The results forced-choice prefe...

This dissertation is a study of rules in Turkish which change grammatical relations or are sensitive to them. It addresses issues of interest to descriptive Turkish grammar and 10 general linguistic theory. Two chapters are devoted to questions about intransitive clauses. Chap' AT 2 examines the claim that impersonal passivizatlon, like personal passivization, involves the advancement of a dire...