從角色指稱語法看「定指」在現代愛爾蘭語非人稱被動結構中的角色

The Role of Definiteness in the Impersonal Passives of Modern Irish: Towards an RRG Characterisation

本文認為愛爾蘭語的非人稱被動結構在語意層次上有非定指的主事者，而在句法上，非人稱被動動詞透過主動詞後面的詞綴來顯示出此主事者為非定指第三人稱代名詞。在這個前提下，非人稱被動動詞在句法中以非分析的特性（即動詞為合成形式）被認為與定指主詞代詞相同。這個分析背後有歷史證據支撐。在我們分析這些結構之後，我們認為角色指稱語法理論應該要允許動詞述語對名詞的主要特徵之定指性有所反應，其運作方式如同動詞對名詞的呼應一樣。我們認為定指性是二分性主要特色中的一個，這些特色可由動詞述語在連結時如論元連結至直接受詞的提升中被鎖定而看出。

This paper hypothesizes that the impersonal passive construction of Irish has an indefinite actor at the level of the semantics and that the impersonal passive verb expresses this as a third person indefinite pronoun in the syntax via a synthetic post-verbal suffix rendered on the matrix verb. When considered in this way, the behavior of the impersonal passive verb in the syntax is shown to be the same with respect to definite subject pronouns when they are expressed in a nonanalytic manner, that is, in the synthetic form of the verb. There is some diachronic evidence in support of this. We examine these constructions and argue that a characterisation in the RRG framework must allow for a verbal predicate sensitive to definiteness as a head feature on nominals, and operate in a manner similar to agreement features. We posit definiteness as one of a number of binary head features and claim that these features are recognized by the verbal predicate at linking time such that the argument linking to direct object is locked from promotion.