LING 371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Idiom, Accusative Case, Theta Role

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 371
• Professor: Junko Shimoyama

Document Summary

In any given sentence, there may be more than one construction. Take this into consideration when drawing trees for sentence including things like (cid:498)to try to avoid (cid:499) So, we know that these types of verbs are some kind of exception with respect to case. It actually takes the whole embedded clause as an argument. This is why it is an exception this usually does not happen. George is assigned accusative case because we can replace it by him. The children receives a theta-role from the verb expect. So, george is actually the subject of the embedded clause, but still receives accusative case. Examples of object control verbs are: convince, persuade. Persuaded takes the children as an external argument. In object control, the verb takes george as one internal argument and to eat pizza as another. The verb assigns a theta-role to george, and also assigns accusative case to george.