The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, September 30, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ
George Bennett (McGill) will be presenting “Argument structure of emission verbs in Scandinavian.” Here is the abstract:
In this talk, I present some early-stage data and thoughts on verbs of emission (e.g., rain, snow, gush, flicker) in Scandinavian. I center the discussion on a couple of argument alternations in which the substance noun is the grammatical subject or introduced by the preposition “av” (in expletive subject constructions) that takes on the equivalent functions of the English by-phrase (introducing external arguments in passives) and of-phrase (the all-purpose DP-internal linker). I explore both options and discuss their implications: Either emission verb structures license substance-noun by-phrases with active voice (e.g., “it rains by a warm rain”), or they cannot take substance-nouns as internal arguments, requiring prepositional licensing (e.g., “it rains of a warm rain”). Either way, the behaviour of these verbs is not characteristic of unaccusative or unergative verbs, suggesting they might be truly avalent.