lexical class, particle-verbs and telicity Cale Johnson - UCLA

AOS2004 / San Diego, March 13, 2004 / Johnson
verbal complexes (Kayne 1994; Koopman and Szabolcsi 2000) has argued that they are
regularly derived through movement of phrases that appear to the right of the verb in
languages like English into positions on the left of the verb as in the following three stage
process.
(11a) [ XP Xº [ YP Yº [ ZP ZP]]
(11b) [ XP Xº [ YP [ ZP ZP] Yº t ZP ]
(11c) [ XP [ YP [ ZP ZP] Yº t ZP ] Xº t YP ]
(iii) Where ZP is the Dat2 argument, Yº is the bare nominal and Xº is the LoAppl head,
namely, the [bi-√] prefix. Kayne has argued, in fact, that this process is the primary
reason why so-called agglutinative languages behave the way they do (see Kayne 1994,
53). But more to the point, one of the effects of the formation of a BNBV inalienable
construction with a Dat2 possessor instead of a Gen possessor is that the Dat2 argument
can form a Goal with respect to the bare noun in a possessive construction: this provides
a bounded telic point for the verb along the lines of the verb-particle construction in
English. The primary difference between a low goal applicative as in the English double
object construction (3b) and a low source applicative as in the Korean example (4a) is
that the possessive relation between direct object and dative possessor is the situation at
the beginning of an event described by a low source applicative but the end point of an
event described by a low goal applicative (see Landau 1999; Pylkkänen 2002, Borer 2004
for elaboration).
[7] Restrictions on lexical aspectual class of LoAppl verbs (˙amt¬u-reduplication)
(i) The most peculiar fact about BNBVs—at least in the corpora that I have been able to
examine—is that they do not seem to form the continuative (marû) aspect at all: the vast
majority of the cases show the simple ˙amt¬u verbal root, a small subset show what I take
to be ˙amt¬u-reduplication (of Yoshikawa’s “distributive plurality” type (Yoshikawa
1993, 312)) and an even smaller set are followed by nominal postpositions of one kind or
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