Towards a unified analysis of the syntax and semantics of get constructions
This thesis develops a novel, unified, syntactic and semantic analysis for a range of get constructions including those with adjectival, prepositional and verbal complements. There are two reasons to believe that such an approach is justified. First, the relevant get constructions demonstrate similar semantic characteristics across complement types, e.g. the presence of Cause (in the sense of Pylkkanen 2008), leading to an obligatorily resultative change-of-state interpretation. Second, the range of constructions display syntactic similarities: for each get construction with no external argument there is a corresponding construction with an external argument; and all of the relevant get constructions take a predicative small clause complement. The approach defended here utilises a formal syntactic and semantic framework to propose an analysis in which get is interpreted as a causative functional head which takes a PredP complement whose function is to add a Holder argument to the property expression in its complement (Bowers 1993, Adger and Ramchand 2003). At this point one of two things may occur. Either (i), the Holder argument raises to the sentential subject position, or (ii), it remains in-situ and an
Brownlow, Oliver Samuel
Linguistics
Towards a unified analysis of the syntax and semantics of get constructions. This thesis develops a novel, unified, syntactic and semantic analysis for a range of get constructions including those with adjectival, prepositional and verbal complements. There are two reasons to believe that such an approach is justified. First, the relevant get constructions demonstrate similar semantic characteristics across complement types, e.g. the presence of Cause (in the sense of Pylkkanen 2008), leading to an obligatorily resultative change-of-state interpretation. Second, the range of constructions display syntactic similarities: for each get construction with no external argument there is a corresponding construction with an external argument; and all of the relevant get constructions take a predicative small clause complement. The approach defended here utilises a formal syntactic and semantic framework to propose an analysis in which get is interpreted as a causative functional head which takes a PredP complement whose function is to add a Holder argument to the property expression in its complement (Bowers 1993, Adger and Ramchand 2003). At this point one of two things may occur. Either (i), the Holder argument raises to the sentential subject position, or (ii), it remains in-situ and an
towards unify analysis syntax_semantics get construction develops novel unify syntactic_semantic analysis range get construction include adjectival prepositional verbal complement reason_believe justify first relevant get construction similar semantic characteristic across complement type presence cause sense lead resultative change state interpretation second range construction display syntactic similarity get construction external argument correspond construction external argument relevant get construction take predicative small clause complement defend utilises formal syntactic_semantic framework propose analysis get interpret causative functional_head take complement whose function add holder argument property expression complement point two_thing may_occur either holder argument raise sentential subject_position remain situ