Abstract
This paper provides an in-depth study of the syntax of German let-middles. It will be shown that these middles can be fully derived in the syntax, and no resort to lexical procedures is required. In particular, I argue that let-middles involve a reflexively marked anticausative (sich lassen), embedding a passive VoiceP. Combined with the fact that they are based on processes that the grammar makes available independently (i.e., the formation of anticausatives and passives), the observation that let-middles pattern like canonical middles in terms of the core properties that define the middle construction strongly suggests that the middle is not a grammatical, but a notional category (Condoravdi 1989; Lekakou 2002, 2005). This paper thereby indirectly supports analyses of canonical middles that treat them as parasitic on other constructions such as passives (Lekakou 2005) or anticausatives (e.g., Hale and Keyser 1987; Schäfer 2008). The proposed analysis also shows that reflexive pronouns without a c-commanding antecedent do not necessarily lead to ungrammaticality as long as their phi-features are formally valued. Let-middles also provide evidence that a passive syntax does not have to correlate with passive morphology. It will be argued that the existence of such morphologically unmarked passives is restricted to contexts in which not enough structure is present for passive morphology to surface. Restructuring infinitives are one such context.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abraham, Werner. 1986. Unaccusatives in German. Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 28: 1–72.
Abraham, Werner. 1987. Was hat sich in ‘Damit hat sich’s’? In Passive im Deutschen, ed. Centre de recherche en linguistique germanique Nice, 51–71. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Abraham, Werner. 1994. Diathesis: The middle, particularly in West-Germanic. What does reflexivization have to do with valency reduction? In Discourse grammar and typology, ed. Abraham Werner, T. Givón, and Sandra A. Thompson, 3–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ackema, Peter, and Maaike Schoorlemmer. 1994. The middle construction and the syntax-semantics interface. Lingua 93: 59–90.
Ackema, Peter, and Maaike Schoorlemmer. 1995. Middles and nonmovement. Linguistic Inquiry 26: 173–197.
Ackema, Peter, and Maaike Schoorlemmer. 2005. Middles. In The blackwell companion to syntax, vol. 3, ed. Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 131–203. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ahn, Byron, and Craig Sailor. 2014. The emerging middle class. In Proceedings of the 46th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 46). UCLA.
Alexiadou, Artemis. 2005. A note on non-canonical passives: The case of the get-passive. In Organizing grammar: Linguistic studies in honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, ed. Hans Broekhuis, Nobert Corver, Riny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinhenz, and Jan Koster, 13–21. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer. 2006. The properties of anticausatives crosslinguistically. In Phases of interpretation, ed. Mara Frascarelli, 187–211. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer. 2015. External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Mona. 1979. Noun phrase structure. PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut.
Bader, Markus. 2014. Das Verb lassen im Deutschen: Zum Zusammenspiel von Auxiliarinversion und Ersatzinfinitiv. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 33(1): 1–44.
Baker, Mark, Kyle Johnson, and Ian Roberts. 1989. Passive arguments raised. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 219–251.
Bayer, Josef, Tanja Schmid, and Markus Bader. 2005. Clause union and clausal position. In The Function of function words and functional categories, ed. Marcel den Dikken and C. Tortora, 79–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bech, Gunnar. 1955. Studien über das deutsche Verbum infinitum, Linguistische Arbeiten 139. Niemeyer: Tübingen.
Bennis, Hans, and Teun Hoekstra. 1989. Why Kaatje was not heard sing a song. In Sentential complementation and the lexicon; Studies in honour of Wim de Geest, ed. Dany Jaspers et al., 21–40. Dordrecht: Foris.
den Besten, Hans. 1982. Some remarks on the ergative hypothesis. Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 21: 61–82.
Bhatt, Rajesh, and Roumyana Pancheva. 2006. Implicit arguments. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, ed. Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 554–584. Oxford: Blackwell.
Biberauer, Theresa. 2003. Reconsidering the EPP and SpecTP in Germanic. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics (COPiL) 1: 15–40.
Bobaljik, Jonathan, and Susi Wurmbrand. 2007. Complex predicates, aspect, and antireconstruction. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 16: 27–42.
Broekhuis, Hans, and Norbert Corver. 2015. Syntax of Dutch. Verbs and verb phrases, vol. 1 (Chapter 3). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Bruening, Benjamin. 2012. By-phrases in passives and nominals. Syntax 16: 1–41.
Burzio, Luigi. 1986. Italian syntax: A government and binding approach. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Burzio, Luigi. 1991. The morphological basis of anaphora. Journal of Linguistics 27: 81–105.
Butler, Jonny. 2004. On having arguments and agreeing: Semantic EPP. York Papers in Linguistics Series 2(1): 1–27.
Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia. 1999. Two German impersonal passives and expletive pro. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 7: 47–57.
Cardinaletti, Anna. 1990. Impersonal constructions and sentential arguments in German. Padova: Unipress.
Carlson, Greg. 1989. On the semantic composition of English generic sentences. In Properties, types and meaning II, ed. Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee, and Raymond Turner, 167–192. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On phases. In Foundational issues in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, ed. Robert Freidin, Carlos P. Otero, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, 133–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chung, Sandra. 2004. Restructuring and verb-initial order in Chamorro. Syntax 7(3): 199–233.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2004. “Restructuring” and functional structure. In Structures and beyond: The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 3, ed. Adriana Belletti, 132–191. New York: Oxford University Press.
Condoravdi, Cleo. 1989. The middle: Where semantics and morphology meet. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 18–30.
Cuervo, Maria Cristina. 2003. Datives at large. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Dahl, Östen. 1975. On generics. In Formal semantics of natural language, ed. Edward L. Keenan, 99–111. Cambridge: University Press.
Dotlačil Jakub, and Radek Šimík. 2013. Peeling, structural case, and Czech retroactive infinitives. In Proceedings of FDSL 9, eds. Uwe Junghanns et al., 105–125. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Embick, David. 1997. Voice and the interfaces of syntax. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Embick, David. 2004. On the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35(3): 355–392.
Embick, David. 2010. Localism versus globalism in morphology and phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Embick, David. 2012. Contextual conditions on stem alternations: Illustrations from the Spanish conjugation. In Romance languages and linguistic theory 2010, ed. Irene Franco, Sara Lusini, and Andrés Saab, 21–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Embick, David. 2013a. Morphemes and morphophonological loci. In Distributed Morphology today: Morphemes for Morris Halle, ed. Alec Marantz and Ora Matushansky, 151–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Embick, David. 2013b. Locality across domains: From morphemes to structures to sounds. Talk given at NELS 44, October 18–22, University of Connecticut.
Enzinger, Stefan. 2010. Kausative und perzeptive Infinitivkonstruktionen, Studia Grammatica 70. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Everaert, Martin. 1986. The syntax of reflexivization. Dordrecht: Foris.
Fagan, Sarah. 1988. The English middle. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 181–203.
Fagan, Sarah. 1992. The syntax and semantics of middle constructions: A study with special reference to German. Cambridge: CUP.
Fanselow, Gisbert. 1989. Coherent infinitives in German. In Syntactic phrase structure phenomena, ed. Christa Bhatt, Elisabeth Löbel, and Claudia Maria Schmidt, 1–16. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fanselow, Gisbert. 1991. Minimale Syntax. Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 32.
Fellbaum, Christiane. 1986. On the middle construction in English. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Folli, Raffaella, and Heidi Harley. 2007. Causation, obligation, and argument structure: On the nature of little v. Linguistic Inquiry 38: 197–238.
Giurgea, Ion, and Elena Soare. 2010. Modal non-finite relatives in Romance. In Modality and mood in Romance: Modal interpretation, mood selection, and mood alternation, ed. Martin G. Becker and Eva-Maria Remberger, 57–80. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Goldberg, Adele E., and Farrell Ackerman. 2001. The pragmatics of obligatory adjuncts. Language 77(4): 798–814.
Greenberg, Yael. 1998. Temporally restricted generics. In Proceedings of SALT VIII, ed. Devon Strolovitch and Aaron Lawson, 55–73. Ithaca: Cornell University.
Grewendorf, Günther. 1983. Reflexivierung in deutschen A.c.I.-Konstruktionen. Kein transformationsgrammatisches Dilemma mehr. Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 23: 120–196.
Grewendorf, Günther. 1987. Kohärenz und Restrukturierung. Zu verbalen Komplexen im Deutschen. In Neuere Forschungen zur Wortbildung und Historiographie der Linguistik, ed. Brigitte Asbach-Schnitker and Johannes Roggenhofer, 123–144. Tübingen: Narr.
Grewendorf, Günther. 1989. Ergativity in German. Dordrecht: Foris.
Grewendorf, Günther. 1990. Small pro in German. In Scrambling and barriers, ed. Günther Grewendorf and Wolfgang Sternefeld, 295–315. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Guasti, Maria Teresa. 1993. Causative and perception verbs. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier.
Gunkel, Lutz. 2003. Infinitheit, Passiv und Kausativkonstruktionen im Deutschen, Studien zur deutschen Grammatik 67. Tübingen: Narr.
Härtl, Holden. 2013. Generic rescue: Argument alternations and the monotonicity condition. In Repairs - The added value of being wrong, ed. Patrick Brandt and Eric Fuß, 95–130. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Haider, Hubert. 1985. Von sein oder nicht sein: Zur Grammatik des Pronomens ‘sich’. In Erklärende Syntax des Deutschen, ed. Werner Abraham, 223–254. Tübingen: Narr.
Haider, Hubert. 1986a. Nicht-sententiale Infinitive. Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 28: 73–114.
Haider, Hubert. 1986b. Fehlende Argumente: Vom Passiv zu kohärenten Infinitiven. Linguistische Berichte 101: 3–33.
Haider, Hubert. 1993. Deutsche Syntax - Generativ. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Haider, Hubert. 1994. Fakultativ kohärente Infinitkonstruktionen im Deutschen. In Zur Satzwertigkeit von Infinitiven und Small clauses, ed. Anita Steube and Gerhild Zybatow, 75–106. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Haider, Hubert. 2003. V-clustering and clause union: Causes and effects. In Verb constructions in German and Dutch (Current issues in Linguistic Theory 242), ed. Pieter A.M. Seuren and Gerard Kempen, 91–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Haider, Hubert. 2010. The syntax of German. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haider, Hubert, and Inger Rosengren. 2003. Scrambling: Nontriggered chain formation in OV languages. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 15(3): 203–267.
Hale, Kenneth, and Samuel Jay Keyser. 1987. A view from the middle. MIT Lexicon Project Working Papers 10.
Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The view from building 20, ed. Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser, 111–176. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz. 1994. Some key features of Distributed Morphology. In MITWPL 21: Papers on phonology and morphology, ed. Andrew Carnie and Heidi Harley, 275–288. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harley, Heidi. 1995. Subjects, Events and Licensing. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Harley, Heidi. 2013. External arguments and the Mirror Principle: On the distinctness of Voice and v. Lingua 125: 34–57.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1990. The grammaticization of passive morphology. In Studies in language 14: 25–72.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In Causatives and transitivity, ed. Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky, 87–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Höhle, Tilman N. 1978. Lexikalistische Syntax. Die Aktiv-Passiv-Relation und andere Infinitiv-konstruktionen im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Hoekstra, Teun, and Ian Roberts. 1993. Middle constructions in Dutch and English. In Knowledge and language II. Lexical and conceptual structure, ed. Eric Reuland and Werner Abraham, 183–220. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Holl, Daniel. 2010. Modale Infinitive und dispositionelle Modalität im Deutschen, Studia Grammatica 71. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Huber, Walter. 1980. Infinitivkomplemente im Deutschen – Transformationsgrammatische Untersuchungen zum Verb lassen. PhD dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin.
Jaeggli, Osvaldo. 1986. Passive. Linguistic Inquiry 17: 587–622.
Kayne, Richard. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kemmer, Suzanne. 1993. The middle voice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kemmer, Suzanne, and Arie Verhagen. 1994. The grammar of causatives and the conceptual structure of events. Cognitive Linguistics 5: 115–156.
Keyser, Samuel Jay, and Thomas Roeper. 1984. On the middle and ergative constructions in English. Linguistic Inquiry 15: 381–416.
Klingvall, Eva. 2012. How to approach complex passives. In Discourse and grammar. A Festschrift in honor of Valéria Molnár, ed. Johan Brandtler, David Håkansson, Stefan Huber, and Eva Klingvall, 395–410. Lund: Centre for Languages and Literature.
Kratzer, Angelika. 1996. Severing the external argument from its verb. In Phrase structure and the lexicon, ed. Johan Rooryck and Laurie Zaring, 109–137. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Kratzer, Angelika. 2000. Building statives. Proceedings of BLS 26: 385–399.
Krifka, Manfred, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Gregory N. Carlson, Alice ter Meulen, Gennaro Chierchia, and Godehard Link. 1995. Genericity: An introduction. In The generic book, ed. Gregory N. Carlson and Francis Jeffry Pelletier, 1–124. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kunze, Jürgen. 1996. Plain middles and lassen middles in German: Reflexive constructions and sentence perspective. Linguistics 34: 645–695.
Labelle, Marie. 2002. The French non canonical passive in se faire. In Proceedings of Linguistics and Phonetics, ed. S. Haraguchi, Bahumil Palek, and Osamu Fujimura. Tokyo: Charles University Press and Meikai University.
Labelle, Marie. 2013. Anticausativizing a causative verb: The passive se faire construction in French. In Non canonical passives, ed. Artemis Alexiadou and Florian Schäfer, 235–260. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lee-Schoenfeld, Vera. 2007. Beyond coherence: The syntax of opacity in German, Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 114. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lekakou, Marika. 2002. Middle semantics and its realization in English and Greek. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14: 399–416.
Lekakou, Marika. 2005. In the middle, somewhat elevated. The semantics of middles and its cross-linguistic realization. PhD dissertation, University of London.
Lenerz, Jürgen. 1977. Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Levin, Beth, and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface, Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 26. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Loewenthal, Judith. 2003. Meaning and use of causeeless causative constructions with laten in Dutch. In Usage-based approaches to Dutch, Lot Occasional Series, No. 1, ed. Arie Verhagen and Jeroen van de Weijer, 97–130. Utrecht: LOT.
Lundin, Katarina. 2003. Small clauses in Swedish: Towards a unified account. PhD dissertation, Lund University.
Marantz, Alec. 1984. On the nature of grammatical relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marantz, Alec. 1991. Case and licensing. In Proceedings of the Eighth Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, ed. Gérman F. Westphal, B. Ao, and H.-R. Chae, 234–253. Ohio State Un: Columbus.
Marantz, Alec. 1997. No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own Lexicon. Penn Working Papers in linguistics 4(2): 201–225.
Marantz, Alec. 2007. Phases and words. In Phases in the theory of grammar, ed. Sook-Hee Choe, Dong-Wee Yang, Yang-Soon Kim, Sung-Hun Kim, and Alec Marantz, 191–222. Soeul: Dong-In Publishing Co.
Marantz, Alec. 2013. Locality domains for contextual allomorphy across the interfaces. In Distributed Morphology today: Morphemes for Morris Halle, eds. Ora Matushansky and Alec Marantz, 95–115. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marelj, Marijana. 2004. Middles and argument structure across languages. PhD dissertation, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1994. On the non-optionality of certain modifiers. In Proceedings of SALT 4, ed. Mandy Harvey and Lynn Santelmann, 230–250. Ithaca: Cornell University.
McFadden, Thomas. 2004. The position of morphological case in the derivation: A study on the syntax-morphology interface. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Perlmutter, David, and Paul Postal. 1983. Towards a universal characterization of passivization. In Studies in Relational Grammar 1, ed. David M. Perlmutter, 3–29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pitteroff, Marcel. 2014. Non-canonical lassen-middles. PhD dissertation, University of Stuttgart.
Pitteroff, Marcel, and Artemis Alexiadou. 2012. The properties of German sl-middles. In Proceedings of WCCFL 29, ed. Jaehoon Choi et al., 214–222. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Pitteroff, Marcel, and Cinzia Campanini. 2013. Variation in analytic causative constructions: A view on German and Romance. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 16(2–3): 209–230.
Pitteroff, Marcel, and Florian Schäfer. 2014. The argument structure of reflexively marked anticausatives and middles: Evidence from datives. In Proceedings of NELS 43, ed. Hsin-Lun Huang, Ethan Poole, and Amanda Rysling, 67–78. Amherst: GLSA.
Pylkkänen, Liina. 2008. Introducing arguments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reinhart, Tanya, and Eric Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 657–720.
Reis, Marga. 1976. Reflexivierung in deutschen A.c.I.-Konstruktionen. Ein transformations-grammatisches Dilemma. Papiere zur Linguistik 9: 5–82.
Reis, Marga. 2001. Bilden Modalverben im Deutschen eine syntaktische Klasse? In Modalität und Modalverben im Deutschen, ed. Reimar Müller and Marga Reis, 287–318. Hamburg: Buske.
Reis, Marga, and Wolfgang Sternefeld. 2004. Review article: Susanne Wurmbrand: Infinitives, restructuring, and clause structure. Linguistics 42(2): 469–508.
Richards, Mark. 2007. On feature-inheritance: An argument from the Phase Impenetrability Condition. Linguistic Inquiry 38: 563–572.
Richards, Mark, and Theresa Biberauer. 2005. Explaining Expl. In The function of function words and functional categories, ed. Marcel den Dikken and C. Tortora, 115–154. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro. Linguistic Inquiry 17: 501–557.
Roberts, Ian. 1987. The representation of implicit and dethematized subjects, Linguistic Models Series. Foris: Dordrecht.
Schäfer, Florian. 2008. The syntax of (anti-)causatives. External arguments in change-of-state contexts, Linguistics Today 126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schäfer, Florian. 2012a. Local Case, cyclic Agree and the syntax of truly ergative verbs. In Local modelling of non-local dependencies in syntax, ed. Artemis Alexiadou, Tibor Kiss, and Gereon Müller, 273–304. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Schäfer, Florian. 2012b. The passive of reflexive verbs and its implications for theories of binding and case. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 15(3): 213–268.
Schäfer, Florian. 2012c. Two types of external argument licensing - the case of causers. Studia Linguistica 66(2): 128–180.
Schäfer, Florian. 2013. Passives of reflexive verbs: The repair of a Principle A violation. In Repairs: The added value of being wrong, ed. Patrick Brandt and Eric Fuss, 335–364. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schäfer, Florian, Sina Zarriess, and Sabine Schulte im Walde. 2013. Passives of reflexives: a corpus study. Talk given at Linguistic Evidence. Berlin: HU.
Schmid, Tanja. 2002. West Germanic IPP-constructions. An optimality theoretic approach. PhD dissertation, University of Stuttgart.
Schmid, Tanja. 2005. Infinitival syntax: Infinitivus pro participio as a repair strategy. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr, and Jim Wood. 2012. Case alternations in Icelandic ‘get’-passives. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 35(3): 269–312.
Steinbach, Markus. 2002. Middle voice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sternefeld, Wolfgang. 2006. Syntax. Eine morphologisch motivierte generative Beschreibung des Deutschen, Band 2. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Stroik, Thomas. 1992. Middles and movement. Linguistic Inquiry 23: 127–137.
Suchsland, Peter. 1987. Zu Syntax und Semantik von ‘lassen’. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 40(5): 652–667.
Sundaresan, Sandhya. 2012. Context and (co)reference in the syntax and its interfaces. PhD dissertation, University of Tromsø and University of Stuttgart.
Sundaresan, Sandhya. 2013. In support of an articulated v layer: insights from Tamil. Talk given at Little v workshop, October 25–26, 2013, University of Leiden.
Szatmári, Petra. 2004. Das heterogene ‘sich lassen’, Beiträge zur germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft 17. Hamburg: Buske.
Troseth, Erika. 2009. Adicity and reference: Middle voice and its components. PhD dissertation, City University of New York.
Verhagen, Arje, and Suzanne Kemmer. 1997. Interaction and causation: A cognitive approach to causative constructions in Modern Standard Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics 27: 61–82.
von Stechow, Arnim. 1995. Lexical decomposition in syntax. In Lexical knowledge in the organisation of language, ed. Urs Egli, Peter E. Pause, Christoph Schwarze, Arnim van Stechow, and Götz Wienold, 81–177. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wood, Jim. 2011. Icelandic let-causatives and case. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 87: 1–52.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2001. Infinitives: Restructuring and clause structure. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2004. Two types of restructuring: Lexical vs. functional. Lingua 114(8): 991–1014.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2006. Licensing Case. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 18(3): 175–234.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2007. How complex are complex predicates? Syntax 10(3): 243–288.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2013a. The features of voice. Talk given at Little v workshop, October 25–26, University of Leiden. http://media.leidenuniv.nl/legacy/wurmbrand-handout.pdf.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2013b. Complex predicate formation via voice incorporation. Unpublished manuscript, University of Connecticut. http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001968.
Zwart, Jan-Wouter. 1998. Nonargument middles in Dutch. Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 42: 109–128. Groningen: University of Groningen.
Zwart, Jan-Wouter. 2012. Easy to (re)analyse: Tough-constructions in minimalism. In Linguistics in the Netherlands, ed. Marion Elenbaas and Suzanne Aalberse, 147–158. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pitteroff, M. Non-canonical middles: a study of personal let-middles in German. J Comp German Linguistics 18, 1–64 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-015-9072-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-015-9072-3