Experiencers--grammatical participants that undergo a certain psychological change or are in such a state--are grammatically special. As objects (John scared Mary; loud music annoys me), experiencers display two peculiar clusters of nonobject properties across different languages: their syntax is often typical of oblique arguments and their semantic scope is typical of subjects. In The Locative Syntax of Experiencers, Idan Landau investigates this puzzling correlation and argues that experiencers are syntactically coded as (mental) locations. Drawing on results from a range of languages and theoretical frameworks, Landau examines the far-reaching repercussions of this simple claim. Landau shows that all experiencer objects are grammaticalized as locative phrases, introduced by a dative/locative preposition. "Bare" experiencer objects are in fact oblique, too, the preposition being null. This preposition accounts for the oblique psych(ological) properties, attested in case alternations, cliticization, resumption, restrictions on passive formation, and so on. As locatives, object experiencers may undergo locative inversion, giving rise to the common phenomenon of quirky experiencers. When covert, this inversion endows object experiencers with wide scope, attested in control, binding, and wh-quantifier interactions. Landau's synthesis thus provides a novel solution to some of the oldest puzzles in the generative study of psychological verbs. The Locative Syntax of Experiencers offers the most comprehensive description of the syntax of psychological verbs to date, documenting their special properties in more than twenty languages. Its basic theoretical claim is readily translatable into alternative frameworks. Existing accounts of psychological verbs either consider very few languages or fail to incorporate other theoretical frameworks; this study takes a broader perspective, informed by findings of four decades of research

/pdf/the-locative-syntax-of-experiencers-1yhsal5pi5.pdf

The Locative Syntax of Experiencers

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/pdf/the-case-of-quirky-subjects-4c4vwi63eq.pdf

The case of quirky subjects

Abstract The article establishes a new generalization concerning domains from which extraction is possible. Taking as the starting point the well-known difference between NPs and VPs regarding extraction, where extraction from Complex NPs is not possible while extraction from Complex VPs is possible, the article argues that the former represents a pervasive pattern found in many contexts, the latter being highly exceptional. More precisely, extraction is impossible not only from clausal but all complements of nouns. Furthermore, it is impossible from complements of prepositions and adjectives as well as ergative verbs. A deduction of the impossibility of extraction from the complements of lexical heads (other than non-ergative verbs) is proposed based on a new approach to phases (i.e. to what counts as a phase) and the Phase-Impenetrability Condition, as well as a particular implementation of Chomsky’s (2013) labeling algorithm. The analysis is extended to the Subject Condition effect and the that-trace effect.

From the Complex NP Constraint to everything: On deep extractions across categories

Syntactic head movement and its consequences

This thesis investigates the syntax of the Latin psych verbs of the ē-class. The main aim of the work is to provide a formal analysis of their possible syntactic configurations in the Generative Grammar framework. The psych verbs of the ē-class are mostly stative in nature and are attested in different patterns: an impersonal pattern (the piget-type), a Subject Experiencer pattern (the doleo-type), and an Object Experiencer pattern (the placeo and the urgeo-type). While the urgeo-type (in which the Experiencer is assigned the Accusative) does not show remarkable syntactic peculiarities if compared to regular transitive verbs, the other types share common characteristics. The basic configuration of these verbs is that of the piget-type, in which both arguments are VP-internal, as none of them receives the Nominative. From this basic structure different patterns can be derived, by promoting the Experiencer or the Stimulus to the subject position. The most ancient type is a transimpersonal configuration, which is progressively de-transitivized in time: the internal Experiencer is re-analysed as a quirky subject and, in a successive stage, the predicate is re-transitivized and its structure is finally aligned with the prototypical accusative pattern. This gives rise to 
an ExpNom/StimAcc configuration. When this process takes place an internal argument is assigned the Inherent Accusative, i.e. a “transitional” Case which does not display the properties of the Structural Accusative: the DP which receives it cannot be passivized and cannot easily undergo ē-
movement. This process of (de)transitivization affects all the verbs described in this work, which outlines a detailed formal analysis of their syntax under a diachronic perspective.

http://paduaresearch.cab.unipd.it/6880/1/cavallo_guido_tesi.pdf

The Latin psych verbs of the \={e}-class: (de)transitivization and syntactic alignement

Example (1) illustrates a standard case of Strong Crossover (SC): (1) *Whoi does hei love ti?

Ian Roberts

Papers

NP-Movement, Crossover and Chain-Formation