PhilSoc meeting of 17^th February 2023 (online)

The recording of a past meeting of PhilSoc is now available to view on the Society’s YouTube channel. This meeting was held online and the speaker was Professor Michelle Sheehan (Newcastle).

Causative and perception verbs are highly promiscuous in Romance languages, often permitting many different kinds of reduced non-finite complements. A cross-linguistic comparison reveals that there are nonetheless robust patterns here, with agentive perception verbs permitting only larger Exceptional Case Marking complements and causative verbs tending to permit only smaller clause union complements, and permissive and non-agentive perception verbs sandwiched between these two extremes (see Davies 1995, Soares da Silva 2005). A consideration of long passivisation of these verbs further shows, however, that even complements which appear alike on the surface can behave differently with respect to passivisation both within and across languages. I offer an overview of long passivisation in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and argue that we can nonetheless find patterns in this apparent chaos. Long passives are permitted either where the complements of these verbs are very small (VPs) or where they are large enough to contain a grammatical subject position (TP). Passivisation is blocked where the complements are phasal VoicePs and this follows for principled reasons if we adopt the analysis developed by Sheehan & Cyrino (2022) based on Chomsky’s (2001) Phase Theory.