Beatric Primus (University of Cologne)

Place: SH Auditorium D

        Time: Tuesday August 30, Wednesday August 31., 14.15–16.00

Tuesday, August 30th

        Title: Agentivity in Impersonal Passives

This I will discuss the agentivity constraint on impersonal passives in several languages, including German, Dutch and Icelandic. A widely acknowledged claim is that impersonal passives in these languages are restricted to human or animate agents. I will show that this condition turns out to be too restricte for Dutch and German, once internet-discourse data are considered. In order to capture the situation in German and Dutch as well as cross-linguistic variation, I will draw upon a cluster concept of agentivity (proto-agent following, a.o., Dowty 1991).

Wednesday, August 31st

        Title: Productivity: Empirical methods and Explanations

This talk will focus on the productivity of different argument structure alternations including impersonal passivization, dative shift and nominalization. Following Barðdal (2008), I will consider productivity in terms of extensibility. Pertinent data for the study of extensibility/productivity include borrowings, lexical innovations, nonce-words, acceptability judgments, and corpus-based type frequency. The corpus-based data are usually drawn from one type of corpus (e.g. either conventional publications or internet data). I will show that a comparative corpus analysis is a good indicator of extensibility in case where data from one type of corpus are inconclusive. I will also discuss different types of explanations that have been proposed for the extensibility of the constructions under discussion.

References:

Barðdal, Jóhanna, 2008. Productivity. Evidence from Case and Argument Structure in Icelandic. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Dowty, David. 1991. Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection. Language 67: 547–619.