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Kertész, András (2017): The historiography of generative linguistics. Tübingen: Narr. [Rezension]
(2019)
This paper investigates the conditions that govern the choice between the German neuter singular relative pronouns das ‘that’ and was ‘what’. We show that das requires a lexical head noun, while in all other cases was is usually the preferred option; therefore, the distribution of das and was is most successfully captured by an approach that does not treat was as an exception but analyzes it as the elsewhere case that applies when the relativizer fails to pick up a lexical gender feature from the head noun. We furthermore show how the non-uniform behavior of different types of nominalized adjectives (positives allow both options, while superlatives trigger was) can be attributed to semantic differences rooted in syntactic structure. In particular, we argue that superlatives select was due to the presence of a silent counterpart of the quantifier alles ‘all’ that is part of the superlative structure.
The present investigation targets the phenomenon commonly called control. Many languages including German and Polish employ non-finite clauses (besides finite clauses) as propositional complements. The subject of these complement clauses is left unexpressed and must generally be interpreted co-referentially with the subject or object of the matrix clause (subject or object control). However. there are also infinitive-selecting verbs that do not allow for a co- referential interpretation of the embedded subject - semantically, the embedded infinitives of these anti-control verbs are thus less dependent on or less unifiable with the matrix proposition. In Polish anti-control constructions, non-finite complements are overtly marked with the complementizer zeby, suggesting that they are structurally more complex (namely. containing a C-projection) than the non-finite complements in control constructions lacking zeby (modulo special contexts. viz. 'control switch'). In a comparative perspective, the paper brings corpuslinguistic and experimental evidence to bear on the question whether surface appearances notwithstanding, the infinitival complements of anti-control verbs in German should similarly be analyzed as truly sentential, i.e., C-headed structures.
Current theories of the syntax-semantics interface associate aspects of meaning that cannot be traced to visible structure with empty projecting heads or constructions as wholes. We present an alternative compositional analysis of the hidden aspectual-temporal, modal or comparative meaning of inchoative, middle, excessive and directional complement constructions. Accord-ingly, the hidden meaning results from a repair mechanism that passes on a locally problematic meaning component to the next higher derivational cycle. The meaning component in question is one half of the logical form of Difference as contributed by certain functional elements or by syntactically transitive (nominative-accusative) configurations.