Invited talk by Lefteris Paparounas: Stative passive ≠ stativized eventive passive: Evidence from Modern Greek

On 11/15/2022 Lefteris Paparouns gave an invited talk, titled Stative passive ≠ stativized eventive passive: Evidence from Modern Greek, to the Yale University Syntax Reading Group

 

Abstract: Analyses of stative passives (e.g. English This door seems recently opened) often employ phrasal layering, whereby the stativizing projection embeds a phrasal verbal structure. Greek is sometimes taken to be the poster child of such analyses, owing to the observation that agent-oriented modifiers (e.g. by-phrases) can ostensibly freely occur in stative passives in this language. This observation has motivated approaches whereby the Greek stativizer embeds a phrasal verbal structure that can be as big as a VoiceP; the claim of such accounts is effectively that Greek stative passives amount to eventive passives augmented with a stativizing layer. 

I identify a number of novel empirical generalizations that call this view into question, showing that Greek stative and eventive passives dissociate with respect to reflexivization, modification by almost, and idiom formation, inter alia. In place of the layering account, a complex head analysis of the kind recently proposed for (some) nominalizations seems better positioned to make sense of the facts.