Unaccusative Verbs in Romance Languages [Hardcover]

The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics. The Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan.List of Tables Acknowledgements Sources of Historical Examples The Ergative Analysis and the Unaccusative Hypothesis Expletive Inversion Partitive Cliticization Bare Subjects Perfect Auxiliary Selection Past Participle Agreement Participial Absolutes Conclusion Notes References IndexIAN E. MACKENZIE is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. His specialist areas are Spanish syntax and semantics, philosophy of language and Spanish in Latin America. He is the author of four books including Spanish: an Essential Grammar (with Peter T. Bradley),