Nominalizations and Participles in Swedish Bjorn¨ Lundquist A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Tromsø, December 2008 ii Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Introduction.............................. 1 1.2 Basic questions and background . 4 1.2.1 Chomsky(1970) ....................... 7 1.2.2 Wasow(1977) ........................ 9 1.2.3 Abney (1987) and following syntactic approaches . 11 1.2.4 Distributed Morphology . 19 1.3 Laying out the framework . 27 1.4 Lexical/syntactic categories . 35 1.4.1 Verbs ‘containing’ Adjectives/Nouns? . 40 1.4.2 Nouns vs. Adjectives . 42 1.5 Outline ................................ 50 I General properties of de-verbal adjectives and de-verbal nominals in Swedish 53 2 Introducing the forms 55 2.1 Introduction.............................. 55 2.2 General description of -nde, -(n)ing and -de ............. 56 2.2.1 Object and Event denoting nominalizations in -(n)ing and -nde 62 2.3 Morphological make-up of the different forms . 64 2.3.1 Verbal conjugation classes and -e/a-nde ........... 64 2.3.2 Structures and lexicalization via morphemes . 68 2.3.3 Passive participles and -ning ................. 75 2.3.4 Alternatives.......................... 79 2.4 Finalnotes............................... 81 3 Semantic effects of the Morphological differences 83 3.1 Introduction.............................. 83 3.2 Causative-inchoative alternations in Swedish . ...... 85 3.3 The issue of reflexivity . 90 3.4 Correlations with Aspect . 97 iii iv CONTENTS 3.4.1 Different types of aspect . 97 3.4.2 Participles........................... 101 3.4.3 Nominalizations . 108 3.5 Summary ............................... 111 4 An apparent syntax mismatch 113 4.1 Introduction .............................. 113 4.2 Prefixation and Incorporation . 114 4.3 Accusative Case Assignment . 118 4.4 The External Argument in Infinitives and Nominalizations . 126 4.4.1 Difference between group 2 and 3? . 133 4.5 Conclusions/summary . 135 II The three suffixes in detail 137 5 The passive participle 139 5.1 Introduction .............................. 139 5.2 What is the passive participle? . 141 5.2.1 Sorting out Passive vs. Unaccusative . 144 5.3 Different types of passive participles . 147 5.3.1 Difference between the active and the passive participle . 153 5.4 Passive participles formed from intransitive verbs . ....... 156 5.4.1 A note on dialectal/idiolectal variation . 158 5.4.2 Class 1: Intransitives that don’t form passive participles . 160 5.4.3 Class 2: Participles occurring only in attributive position . 166 5.4.4 Class 3. Participles that show up in predicative position . 175 5.4.5 Class 4. Monotransitive participles occurring under bli . 179 5.4.6 Summary ........................... 181 5.5 Analysis................................ 186 5.5.1 Restrictions on stative/target state participles . 186 5.6 Interaction with copulas/Phrasal blocking . 187 5.7 Conclusion .............................. 193 6 The nde-participles and nde-nominals 195 6.1 Introduction .............................. 195 6.2 Unified accounts of -nde ....................... 195 6.3 The already known restrictions . 197 6.4 Thenominalgaps ........................... 199 6.5 The different types of participles . 201 6.5.1 Verbal participles . 202 6.5.2 Prepositional participles . 208 6.5.3 Adjectival participles . 213 CONTENTS v 6.6 Speculations about the relationship between category and argument structure................................ 215 7 (N)ing 217 7.1 Selectional Restrictions on (n)ing .................. 217 7.1.1 Verbclasses.......................... 219 7.1.2 Different types of -(n)ing? .................. 226 7.1.3 Clearly mass-denoting (n)ing-nominals . 226 7.1.4 Clearly count denoting result-nouns . 230 7.2 Analyzing (n)ing ........................... 234 8 Concluding remarks 237 vi CONTENTS Acknowledgments I would like to give special thanks to the following persons: Gillian Ramc- hand, for being my initial supervisor and helping me throughout the process, and my supervisor Tarald Taraldsen for inspiring discussions constructive crit- icisms during the writing up period of the thesis. In addition to my supervi- sors, I would like to mention Pavel Caha and Michal Starke who provided inspiration and helped me develop my thoughts at various stages of the dis- sertation. The following people also deserve special mention for important discussions and conversations throughout the dissertation process, and help with data from various languages: Monica Baˇsi´c, Kristine Bentzen, Antonio F´abregas, Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, Peter Muriungi, Marina Pantcheva, Peter Svenonius, Kaori Takamine (special thanks to her for theloan ofthesun- lamp!), Trond Trosterud, Mai Tungseth, Mercedes Tubino-Blanco, Øystein Vangsnes, Marleen van de Vate, Anna-Lena Wiklund and Madeleine Halmøy (special thanks to her for that nice dinner the other night). Much of my thinking has been influenced by seminars and classes given by the linguists at CASTL: Peter Svenonius, Klaus Abels, Tarald Taraldsen, Michal Starke and Gillian Ramchand. I also thank the faculty at the University of Arizona where I spent my term abroad, for their mind-broadening input in the form of classes and discussions, especially Heidi Harley, Andrew Carnie and Andy Barss. I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues in Tromsø for making my time in Tromsø challenging, fun and rewarding. Thank you to Peter Muri- ungi and Marina Pantcheva for being such patient office buddies and good friends. Pavel Caha deserves endless thanks for endless chess games, endless bike rides, endless linguistic discussion etc.. Many thanks also to my fellow team members in the ‘Mad Scientists’ for tension busting quiz fun— Kris- tine Bentzen, Antonio F´abregas, Gillian Ramchand, Marleen van de Vate and Christian Uffman. Finally, I would like to give a general thanks to the University of Tromsø, and to CASTL in particular for providing such a good intellectual home for me these past four years. Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Introduction Verbs typically have a couple of morpho-syntactic properties that separate them from adjectives and nouns. Most notably, they can typically assign structural case and carry tense and person agreement marking, while nouns and adjectives normally lack these properties. From a semantic perspective, verbs are usually assumed to denote events, while nouns denote individuals and adjectives denote properties. Verbal stems can however show up in typical adjectival and nominal contexts, showing adjectival and nominal properties as well. When verbs turn up with adjectival properties we call them participles, and as participles, they have more restricted abilities to assign case (just like other adjectives), and they in general do not carry tense marking (just like ad- jectives) and do not show person agreement, but rather gender agreement (just like adjectives). When verbs turn up as nouns we call them nominalizations (or verbal nouns), and as nominalizations, they have a more restricted ability to assign structural case and carry tense marking, just like nouns in general. Further, if a nominalization shows gender, number and person marking, this marking reflects the gender/number/person of the noun itself, and not any of its arguments. It is well established in the literature that certain types of participles show more verbal features than other types of participles, and that certain types of nominalizations show more verbal features than other types of nominaliza- tions (see Chomsky 1970, Wasow 1977, Levin and Rappaport 1986, Abney 1987, Grimshaw 1990, Kratzer 1996, Kratzer 2000, Rapp 2000, Alexiadou 2001, Embick 2004, Emonds 2000, Harley 2007, Alexiadou 2007 etc.). I will quickly exemplify this below, using examples from English. In (1b) we see 1 2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION a construction with a passive participle that shows most of the typical verbal traits: it assigns accusative case and it has exactly the same eventive proper- ties (i.e. expresses the same aspect and aktionsart) as the corresponding active sentence in (1a). The passive and the active sentence also contain exactly the same arguments (Agent, Recipient and Theme), although in the passive ver- sion the Agent is optional. (1) a. The university offered him a new job yesterday. b. He was a offered a new job (by the university) yesterday. The participle in (1b) still shows some adjectival behavior: it cannot for ex- ample carry tense marking and person agreement. Further, in many languages where predicative adjectives show gender agreement, verbal participles cor- responding to the one in (1b) would show gender and number agreement as well (e.g. Swedish and Romance languages). In (2b), another example of a passive participle is given: (2) a. Peter (*still) broke the window yesterday. b. The window was still broken (*by Peter) yesterday. Here, the active and passive construction differ from each other both in terms of eventivity and argument structure: the active sentence denotes an achieve- ment (a punctual change), while the passive sentence denotes a state, just like most non-derived adjectives do. This is clearly seen in the interpretation of the temporal adverb “yesterday”: in (2a) the adverb can only pick out the time of the event, while in (2b) it can only pick out the time when the state of the window being broken holds. This difference is not seen in (1). Regarding the argument structure, the active sentence has two arguments - an Agent and a Patient, while the passive sentence only has one argument (corresponding to