Speaker: Despoina Oikonomou (MIT) Title: Analytic vs. Synthetic morphology in the domain of Passive: deriving the differences Date: Tuesday, December 8th Time: 10:00am-11:00am Place: 32-D461
Cross-linguistically we observe two types of Passives; Analytic (e.g. English) and Synthetic (e.g. Greek). Evidence from different languages (Albanian, Armenian, Amharic, Greek, PA Arabic, Quechua, Shakkinoono/ Kafinoonoo, Swedish, Turkish) suggests the morphology used in synthetic – and crucially not in analytic passives – can also appear in at least one of the following environments; a) verbal reflexives and reciprocals, b) anticausatives, c) deponent verbs (as well as other constructions which vary cross-linguistically) which altogether constitute the so-called Middle Voice (see Kemmer 1993, Alexiadou & Doron 2012).
This talk aims to explain this contrast between Synthetic and Analytic Passives. I argue that under an analysis of Passive as existential binding of the external argument (Legate 2010, Bruening 2013) the crucial difference in synthetic vs. analytic Passives relies on the morphosyntactic merger (bundling) of the Passive Voice and the little-v head in Synthetic but not in Analytic Passives. In the spirit of dynamic approaches to phasehood (den Dikken 2006, Bobalijk & Wurmbrand 2013, Wurmbrand 2015) I take this merger operation (Pylkkänen 2008, Bobaljik 2012) to be responsible for the formation of a single interpretation domain in synthetic passives thus allowing a range of interpretations which depend on the properties of the vP predicate (cf. Maranz 2007, 2013, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2004, Alexiadou & Doron 2012, Anagnostopoulou & Samioti 2013).