Abstract: Collins 1997, 2003 claims that quotative inversion and locative inversion involve A-movement to Spec TP (see also Storment 2024). This claim has recently been argued for on the basis of the distribution of parasitic gaps by Murphy 2022. The purpose of this short squib is to provide two additional arguments for A-movement in quotative inversion.
Two More Arguments for A-Movement in Quotative Inversion
Editor: Chris Collins
The purpose of this volume is to promote cross-disciplinary research on the topic of implicit arguments. Potential contributors are encouraged to contact me at cc116@nyu.edu.
An implicit argument is an argument of a predicate that is not expressed (e.g., in writing, in speech, or in signing). Consider the passive sentence: ‘The book was written quickly and at great expense.’ In this sentence, there is an understood agent of writing that is not expressed anywhere in the sentence. Such an understood agent is called an ‘implicit argument’. Implicit arguments are found in many other constructions in English as well, such as evaluative adjectives, middles and nominalizations.
Implicit arguments are important theoretically since they raise sharp questions about the relationship between meaning and form. There seems to be a mismatch between the form of the sentence and how it is interpreted, bringing up the following questions: How is information about the implicit argument represented linguistically? How is the interpretation of the implicit argument recovered by the addressee? How could a computer be programmed to understand implicit arguments? How do children acquire implicit arguments? How does the brain process implicit arguments?
This book gathers together contributions from experts in various fields, including philosophers, computational linguists, corpus linguists, syntacticians (of various frameworks), semanticists, typologists, child language researchers, psycholinguists, neurolinguists and applied linguists. The book also aims at increasing cross-linguistic research on implicit arguments.
A new theory of argument structure, based on the syntactic operation Merge and presented through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction.
In Principles of Argument Structure, Chris Collins investigates principles of argument structure in minimalist syntax through an in-depth analysis of properties of the English passive construction. He formulates a new theory of argument structure based on the only structure-building operation in minimalist syntax, Merge, which puts together two syntactic objects to form a larger one. This new theory should give rise to detailed cross-linguistic work on the syntactic and semantic properties of implicit arguments.
Collins presents an update and defense of his influential 2005 theory of the passive, including a completely original theory of implicit arguments. He makes a direct empirical argument for the Theta-Criterion against various claims that it should be eliminated. He also discusses the conception of voice in syntactic theory, arguing that VoiceP does not introduce external arguments, a position otherwise widely accepted in the field. He shows how the ‘smuggling’ approach to the passive extends naturally to the dative alternation accounting for a number of striking c-command asymmetries. He compares syntactic and semantic approaches to argument structure, outlining conceptual problems with adopting formal semantics as the basis for a theory of argument structure.
The book will be of interest not only to syntacticians and semanticists, but also to typologists investigating the cross-linguistic properties of the passive, psycholinguists and computer scientists working on natural language understanding, and philosophers thinking about the issue of “implicit content.” It includes an appendix that provides common-sense guidelines for doing syntactic research using internet data.
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of successive cyclic inversion, combining the analyses of quotative inversion in Collins 2003 and of the dative alternation in Collins 2022/2024. The paper shows how successive cyclic inversion can be used to explain certain perplexing word order differences between the passive and quotative inversion.
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