1

In Chomsky (2000,2001), the passive, along with unaccusative and other forms of participle object constructions, with the light v is considered 'defective' because as Chomsky (2001:6) says: light v of a passives lacks: 1. The ability to assign Accusative Case; 2. This inability results from not having a phi-complete bundles, in fact only [person] is valued after the light v probes. That's why the DP object in passive sentences has to move for Nominative Case assigning in T and complete the phi-agreement features there.

What remains mysterious for me is not this movement for Nom Case, neither the defective nature, but I have data in which both a Transitive Active v has the same phi-features exhibited on this 'defective' light v of the passive. Those who are familiar with Phase Theory in the minimalist program, please help me understand more this 'defectiveness notion' in the light of passives.

Improve this question
8
  • Not sure what you find “mysterious” about it. Could you explain more what kind of data you have?
    – Alex B.
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 23:30
  • 1
    It may be a simple confusion of the linguistic term defective verb (meaning "a verb with an incomplete conjugation, or one which cannot be used in some other way as normal verbs can", to quote Wikipedia), and the more common, non-linguistic sense of "defective" meaning "not correctly designed or made; damaged". Chomsky clearly meant the grammatical sense, because he uses lacks for arguments. There's nothing overtly defective; there can't be, because light v is a non-terminal.
    – jlawler
    Commented Apr 24, 2018 at 3:36
  • The mysterious thing I find is the correlation between inability to assign Accusative Case and the Phi-features:[person],[number],[gender]. For example in 'The city was destroyed by the army', the internal argument 'the city' must move for Case, because the passive cannot match this feature because it's defective, this is my question, on what grounds this correlation between Case and Phi is established.
    – Tsutsu
    Commented Apr 24, 2018 at 9:46
  • The data I have are from Berber, in the active voice we say: 'carz-x ijja' 'I plowed the land', 'carz-x ijjan' 'I plowed the lands', in the Passive, this agreement system (Phi-features) remain the same, they don't become defective to mean that the head v is defective and we say, 'ytwacarz ijja' and 'twacarz-n ijja-n' respectively. I have the whole paradigm of data, but the space here is narrow to present them in a systematic way. Now if the light v is defective (it lacks a feature of agr) and that's why the passive is defective, how can we account for this issue with the data here..
    – Tsutsu
    Commented Apr 24, 2018 at 9:55
  • Perhaps you can't. These theories are very abstract and are not based on data as much as faith. If you lack faith, they often don't work.
    – jlawler
    Commented Apr 24, 2018 at 22:18

0

Reset to default

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.