Abstract
My main goal is to explain why SE-passives but not past participle passives are subject to the Person Constraint (PC). The core hypothesis will be that the Agent of passives is not syntactically projected in an A-position, but only represented by a valued +ARB feature, which may attach not only to little v, but also to Tense. These two possibilities respectively characterize past participle passives and SE-passives. Given these assumptions, the PC on SE-passives is explained as being due to the fact that the Person feature on Tense is already valued as +ARB, which prevents the subjects of SE-passives from checking Person features. Those DPs that do not carry Person features do not need to enter an AGREE relation in Person (but only in Number), and as such they are allowed as subjects of SE-passives. Past participle passives are immune to the PC because the +ARB feature is valued on little v, which leaves Tense unvalued for Person, which allows it to act as a Probe for DPs that carry not only Number, but also Person.
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Notes
- 1.
D’Alessandro (2007) illustrated the PC on SE-passives with the Italian example in (1), replicated by Mendikoetxea’s (2008) Spanish example in (2):
Note however that the ungrammaticality of (1)–(2) is not due to the PC, but rather to the fact that SE is used instead of mi ‘me’ with a verb in the first/second person. As soon as this is taken care of, as in (3)–(4), these examples become acceptable:
Thus, quite ironically, the examples in (1)–(2), which are the only ones supplied by d’Alessandro in favor of the PC on SE-passives, turn out to be (apparent) counterexamples. I will not try to explain why this type of example is not sensitive to the PC, limiting myself to observing that (1) the only other verb that allows 1st person subjects with SE-verbs is also a perception verb, a auzi ‘to hear’ and (2) the examples become unacceptable as soon as we use particular time reference: *M-am văzut ieri la televizor ‘[I] me-have seen yesterday on TV’ (Romanian). The latter observation may suggest that we are dealing with a SE-middle rather than with a SE-passive (Giurgea 2015): the sentence attributes to the subject a noteworthy habitual property (that of being habitually seen/heard on TV/radio). In any case, like middles, the SE-passives of these two perception verbs involve some kind of modality.
- 2.
The Romanian pe functions as a Direct Object Marker (DOM). Its distribution is similar, but not identical to that of the Spanish a.
- 3.
The distribution of clitic-doubling and preposition marking of direct objects are too complex to be reviewed here. The reader is referred to Dobrovie-Sorin (1985, 1990, 1994). The only point relevant for now is that indefinite pronouns (e.g., cineva ‘somebody’) are the only DPs for which PE-marking does not correlate with a specific interpretation, which is why clitic doubling is ruled out.
- 4.
The impossibility of clitic-doubling referred to in the text concerns A-marked non-pronominal DPs occurring in argumental positions. Left peripheral DPs are known to make clitic-doubling possible across Romance languages, even in those languages that do not have DOM (Italian, French). See Cinque (1977), Dobrovie-Sorin (1985, 1990, 1994) and more recently, for the Spanish data, Fábregas (2013).
- 5.
It is however unclear why such a requirement holds: the middle interpretation of SE-verbs involves attributing a characterizing property to the subject, but nothing in principle prevents attributing a characterizing property to first/second pronouns. According to Blanche-Benveniste 1978, Burston 1983, and Laenzlinger 1993 the PC on middle-passive SE would be due to an animacy feature, and according to Ormazabal and Romero (2007) to individuation. As observed by Rezac (2011), the metonymy-based exceptions argue against Béjar and Rezac (2003, 2009), according to which the PC on ‘middle-passive’ SE is due to the discourse-participant feature.
- 6.
Let me note that the main point of Rezac (2006) is not the intervention-based explanation of the PCC, which had already been assumed by many theoreticians, but rather new empirical data that confirms the intervention analysis. Rezac observes that this analysis predicts that the PCC disappears if the DPAbsolutive is raised past the intervening DPDat. And indeed, this prediction is confirmed (although only for a sub-set of Basque speakers, those speakers who allow ‘absolutive displacement’, i.e., they allow the subject of applicative unaccusatives to become ergative (crucially this happens in all and only PCC contexts).
- 7.
In order to make his analysis compatible with the hypothesis that the Initiator of passives is not syntactically projected, Giurgea suggests that the offending Person feature might be a feature of the passivizing head Pass, a head supposed to existentially bind the unsaturated external argument position (Bruening 2012): since, in the case of SE-passives, this head not only binds the external argument but also introduces an animacy restriction on the variable it binds, Giurgea suggests that this head bears an interpretable Person feature.
- 8.
French SE-verbs are ambiguous between passive and middle readings. Adverbs such as facilement ‘easily’ are only compatible with the middle reading, which in turn is incompatible with control into a final clause. If facilement is suppressed, the example becomes grammatical, but it loses the middle reading.
- 9.
In this paper I will not be interested in by-phrases. For concreteness I assume that they are adjuncts. I will not try to explain the generalization according to which the by-phrases related to participle passives have the same th-roles as the subjects of the corresponding active verbs.
- 10.
Kayne (2000) assumes this hypothesis for all object clitics in Romance. This view is most plausible for SE, the pronominal analysis of which is debatable (see Burzio 1986, who treats it as an ‘affix’): see in particular the fact (established by clear tests) that the postverbal subjects of SE-verbs sit in the direct object position. Compare sich-verbs in German, which do not allow their postverbal subjects to sit in the direct object position.
- 11.
The only exception I know of is Adger and Harbour (2007).
- 12.
The indicated scores reflect judgments of ten informants, on a scale from 0 to 3 (? = 2,?? =1; for those speakers who did not use??, the judgment? was counted as 1.5).
- 13.
This generalization, which also holds in Italian and Spanish, is not invalidated by examples of the type in (1), uttered in a context in which an owner talks to a pet dog (example due to Kańsky 1992). Crucially, the dog is a discourse participant (the addressee) and as such it is assimilated to a human:
- 14.
MacDonald’s data are confronted with two problems. The first one is maybe marginal, being raised by an ill-chosen example, the version of (33)a that contains an indefinite DP, unas manos. This example is problematic, since unas manos cannot occur with a body-part meaning in active configurations:
The second problem is that the German counterpart of (33)a is acceptable in German (Florian Schäfer, p.c. January 2016), but German does not have SE-passives.
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Acknowledgments
This article is a revised version of a presentation at Workshop on Romance SE/SI, University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 21–22 2016. I would like to thank Artemis Alexiadou, Ion Giurgea and Omer Preminger for comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Dobrovie-Sorin, C. (2021). Implicit Agents and the Person Constraint on SE-Passives. In: Armstrong, G., MacDonald, J.E. (eds) Unraveling the complexity of SE. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 99. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57004-0_5
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