Abstract for Ivy Sichel's talk

Topic... Comment! / What causativization in nominalization might tell us about agents
Ivy Sichel (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
February 13, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

What might causativization in nominalization tell us about the syntactic representation of Agents? Nominalizations place tighter restrictions then clauses on the realization of causes and agents, making them a good testing ground for the representation of causes and agents. The empirical picture, however, is by no means settled. Marantz (1997) has taken the absence of causers in nominalization (the famous *the farmer's growth of tomatoes) to mean that Agents are introduced as part of the 'root'; Alexiadou (2001) considers both agents and causers to be essentially missing in nominalization; the 'full vP within process nominals' of Fu, Roeper, Borer (2001) probably means that both causers and agents are present in nominalizations, introduced via vP. Marantz's syntactic distinction between causers and agents has been disputed by Harley & Noyer (2000) who argue for a 'world knowledge' approach to the representation of causation in nominalizations ('john's accumulation of wealth' vs. '*the table's accumulation of dust'). This is interesting, but there still remains a residue in the domain of psych-predicate nominalizations: Obj-Exp verbs, a kind of 'causative' ('the news worried mary'), can never be nominalized (*'the news' worry of mary), probably a cross-linguistic truth. We'll talk about the syntactic/world-knowledge status of agent representation and try to get a better handle on the English facts and their significance. I'll also introduce some Hebrew facts which might help to tease apart the representation of the agent/cause from the derivation of a causative nominalization.

Basic typology of causativization:
Levin, B. and M. Rappaport. 1995. Unaccusativity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Chapter 3.

World-knowledge vs. Syntax in the representation of agents in nominalization:
Harley, H. & R. Noyer. 2000. Formal vs. Encyclopedic properties of vocabulary: Evidence from nominalization. In B. Peters (ed.) The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface. Elsevier Press.

Obj-Exp predicates and nominalization:
Pesetsky, D. 1995. Zero Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press. Chapter 3.