Degrees of ergativity in Romance causatives

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• Dr Michelle Sheehan (Anglia Ruskin University)
• Thursday 28 January 2016, 16:00-17:30
• GR06/07, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Sidgwick Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Theodora Alexopoulou.

Many languages have a causative construction in which transitive causees pattern differently from intransitive causees: the ‘ergative’ pattern or canonical causative construction of Comrie (1975). Amongst Romance languages the pattern is often labelled the faire-infinitif after Kayne’s (1975) description of French. Across Romance it is characterised by dative case on the transitive causee and VS word order, but it is also subject to considerable microparametric variation, much of which has not previously been adequately described or explained. (1) a. Il fera [boire un peu de vin à son enfant] (Fr.) he make.FUT drink.INF a bit of wine to his child ‘He’ll make his child drink a bit of wine.’ b. Il fera [chanter son enfant] he make.FUT sing.INF his child ‘He’ll make his child sing.’ In this talk I provide a description of some of the many attested patterns and attempt to model the arising similarities and differences in terms of a parameter hierarchy, developing work by Roberts (2012) and other members of the ReCoS group in Cambridge. The resultant parameter hierarchy determines the features of a single thematic head which introduces the causee and can also optionally do other things such as assigning inherent or structural Case and triggering movement. The arising hierarchy, I argue, can be derived from a fairly standard version of Case Theory and intervention.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Linguistics Forum series.

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