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Morphology and Meaning: Selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna, February 2012
Edited by Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Hans Christian Luschützky and Wolfgang U. Dressler
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 327] 2014
► pp. 315–330

Mismatch verbs

A unified account of unaccusatives and deponents

| University of Leipzig

The term ‘deponent’ traditionally refers to a class of verbs in Latin or Greek which is characterized by a mismatch between their morphological form and their syntactic and semantic context. Deponent verbs appear in passive form but in active syntax/semantics. In this paper, I argue that this mismatch between form and function is not as uncommon as one might expect. In particular, I show that we find the same kind of mismatch with unaccusative verbs in many languages amongst which are English or the Romance languages. The argumentation will be based on a detailed investigation of how deponent and unaccusative verbs behave in all modules of the grammar. Based on the findings of this discussion, I propose a unified morphosyntactic analysis for deponents and unaccusatives. The analysis elegantly captures the particular behavior of these verbs by invoking two principles: Identity Avoidance and Lexical Override.

Published online: 27 February 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.327.22wei
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Grestenberger, Laura
2023. Deponency. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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