Derivational Structures of Instrumental Generic Constructions In English (Essays in Memory of the Late Professor Yukio Ito)

抄録

The English instrumental intransitive constructions with a generic reading, which have been regarded as pseudo-middles cannot be treated as middles, because the intransitive construction allows object insertion. Rather, they should be understood as the intransitive counterparts of the instrumental generic transitive (IGT) construction, that is, the instrumental generic intransitive (IGI). IGIs and IGTs share a basic syntactic structure and are differentiated by phonological specification rules after syntax. Their instrumental subjects are introduced by a light verb (LV) without lexical information, vFUNCTOR (vF). In contrast, the subject of a middle is derived by the object movement. Fuuthermore, the generic properties of the IGI, IGT, and middle can be uniformly accounted for by a fine-grained event structure analysis os the Logical Form (LF). In the IGT and IGI, θ-role assignment can be captured derivationally by means of the LF representations based on our derivational structures. Therefore, θ-role assignment rules and principles at the lexicon-syntax interface can be discarded. This study rationalizes the organization of a possible grammatical model by reducing the lexical burden. Thus, our proposal enables the capturing of the English instrumental constructions in a more comprehensive and elegant manner.