Morphology circle: Lefteris Paprounas

Speaker: Lefteris Paprounas (UQAM)

Title: Stative passives as complex heads: Event and argument structure in Greek

Date and time: 14 October, 4pm (CET)

Place: Zoom

Abstract

This talk identifies a set of novel generalizations in the morphosyntax of stative passives (e.g. ’The wall is already painted’) in Greek. In particular, it shows that stative passives crucially differ from their eventive counterparts in the language in both event and argument structure: the sole argument of the stative passive is external to the eventive core syntactically and thematically; and all eventuality-oriented modification in the stative passive targets the state, not the event. I argue that both generalizations follow on an approach whereby the stative passive is syntactically deverbal yet lacks phrasal verbal structure, converging with the conclusions of an emerging literature on both stative passives and nominalizations. The results bear on broader issues in the study of verbal inheritance, and on the question of what it means for an object to be syntactically constructed.

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