Syntactic Productivity

The productivity of Nom-Acc and Nom-Dat (2)
• On the generative approach, this would at best be expected for the
Nom-Dat construction, but it is not expected for the Nom-Acc
construction, which is supposed to be default.
• This means that borrowed verbs with the Nom-Acc construction are
also assigned case and argument structure constructions “lexically,”
exactly like borrowed verbs with the Nom-Dat construction
• If the borrowed Nom-Acc verbs had not been assigned case and
argument structure constructions on the basis of their synonymous
verb-specific construction in Icelandic, but rather on some “default”
basis, one would expect some more of the Nom-Dat verbs to have
been assigned Nom-Acc
67
Bergen Jóhanna Barðdal June 5, 2008