ePrints

Passives of causatives and perception verbs in Italian

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Michelle SheehanORCiD

Downloads

• Accepted version [.pdf]

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

This paper argues for a phase-based analysis of passivization patterns with causative (fare ‘make’) and perception verbs (vedere ‘see’, guardare ‘watch’) in standard Italian, based on corpus data and acceptability judgements. We show that Italian (long) passives face clear restrictions sensitive to complement type and matrix verb, and argue that, as in English and Brazilian Portuguese, passivation is blocked where a causative/perception verb selects a (VoiceP) phase (Sheehan and Cyrino 2024). Conversely, long passivation is possible where a complement is either: (a) smaller than a phase (VP or vP) or (b) as large as TP, including a low ‘subject position’ feeding onwards A-movement.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Casalicchio J, Sheehan M

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Linguistic Inquiry

Year: 2025

Pages: 1-61

Online publication date: 15/07/2025

Acceptance date: 10/06/2025

Date deposited: 10/06/2025

ISSN (print): 0024-3892

ISSN (electronic): 1530-9150

Publisher: MIT Press Direct

URL: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.a.60

DOI: 10.1162/ling.a.60

ePrints DOI: 10.57711/c2bg-0f31

Altmetrics

Share