Heidi Harley (colloquium abstract)

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A morphosyntactic account of the 'Latinate' ban on dative shift in English

Heidi Harley
University of Arizona

ABSTRACT

I will present a morphosyntactic analysis of a famous problem within English syntax, namely the ban on double object constructions with ditransitive verbs borrowed from Latin or one of its daughter Romance languages. "Mary showed her paintings to John" alternates with "Mary showed John her paintings", but Mary "displayed her paintings to John" does not alternate with "*Mary displayed John her paintings." A bipartite analysis of these Romance verbs, which dissects them into an incorporated particle such as dis- and a verb root such as -play, each heading its own syntactic projection, will be shown to allow an independently motivated account of this otherwise puzzling restriction, which otherwise does not admit of a non-stipulative linguistic description. I will argue that this analysis can also help explain the tendency of Romance verbs not to appear in verb- particle constructions "I showed the paintings off", but "*I exhibited the paintings off" and in resultative constructions "I hammered the metal flat" but "*I depressed the metal flat". The analysis depends on the assumption that English-learning infants have adequate cues in the input to motivate synchronic decomposition of the Latinate verbs, and I argue that in fact there are a number of such cues available: prosodic, phonotactic and morphological, although not semantic. Within an interpretive, postsyntactic view of semantic composition, however, the idiom-like, 'lexicalized' status of certain kinds of syntactically complex structures is not theoretically surprising.