Implicit arguments in English double object constructions
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Implicit arguments in English double object constructions Benjamin Bruening1
Received: 6 October 2019 / Accepted: 25 November 2020 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Pesetsky (1995) argued that both objects in the double object construction must be selected arguments of the lexical verb, based on patterns of optionality. A closer examination shows that this is not correct. The second object of the double object construction and both the NP and PP of the PP frame behave like selected arguments of the lexical verb: the lexical verb determines both whether they can be implicit or not, and how they are interpreted when they are (indefinite versus definite). In contrast, particular lexical verbs determine whether the first object of the double object construction can be dropped, but not how it is interpreted. All implicit first objects are interpreted as pragmatically recoverable definites. Implicit first objects also do not license sluicing, unlike all other implicit objects. I propose a purely syntactic account of these patterns, using the ApplP analysis of double object constructions (Marantz 1993; Bruening 2001). In the analysis, arguments of functional heads like Voice and Appl can only be implicit in the presence of a Pass(ive) head, but arguments of lexical verbs are left implicit through adjunction of an operator to the lexical V. I show that implicit arguments are not projected as NPs in the syntax, contra works like Landau (2010). The failure of sluicing with implicit first objects is then analogous to the failure of sluicing with active-passive pairs. I also suggest that the identity condition on ellipsis makes reference to maximal projections, not to heads as in Rudin (2019). Keywords Sluicing · Implicit arguments · Double object constructions · Ditransitives · Applicatives
B B. Bruening
[email protected]
1
Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA
B. Bruening
1 Introduction There is no shortage of analyses of English double object constructions, exemplified in (1): (1)
The teacher assigned the students a lot of homework.
One major point of contention is what projects each of the NP objects. In some accounts, both NPs are arguments of the lexical verb (e.g., Larson 1988; Pesetsky 1995); in small clause accounts, neither is (they form a small clause; e.g., Kayne 1984; Aoun and Li 1989; den Dikken 1995; Harley 2008; Pylkkänen 2008). In another variation, the second object is an argument of the lexical verb, but the first object is not, it is instead projected by a functional head Appl(icative) (Marantz 1993; Bruening 2001, 2010a). (I know of no analysis where the first object is treated as an argument of the lexical verb but the second is not.) Pesetsky (1995) looks at patterns of argument optionality and argues that both objects must be selected arguments of the lexical verb. This is because particular lexical verbs determine whether each object is obligatory or optional. There are verbs like wish, ha
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