Restrictions on reflexive and anti-causative readings in nominalizations and participles

Abstract

This article discusses the absence of reflexive or self-caused readings in certain types of participles and de-verbal nominalizations, like the hanging of the suicidal patient and The suicidal patient was hanged yesterday. I argue that the “anti-reflexive” reading is not triggered by the presence of a subject PRO or pro, but rather by the absence of reflexive marking, i.e. overt marking that functions to recode lexically specified co-reference relations between the arguments of a predicate. I argue that the verb-phrase needs to be decomposed into at least two subparts/subevents and that each sub-event carries information about the participants involved in it (as in e.g. Pustejovsky 1995 and Ramchand 2008b). More specifically, arguments receive their thematic information from indices on verbal heads that introduces sub-events. Event-denoting nominalizations and participles in general inherit the event structure from the verb, i.e. the indices present in the verbal roots. I further argue that simple reflexives can be verbal heads, that are inserted as a last resort when there is a mismatch between the lexically stored information of a verb and the structure generated in the syntax. This article focuses on data from Swedish, but comparisons will be made with English.