Semantic and Morphological Restrictions in Experiencer Predicates

Abstract

It has long been observed that both the meaning and the form of a verb play a role in determining the syntactic configurations in which this verb is found. For example, give, but not donate or wash, is used in the double-object construction: I gave/*donated/*washed Mary a car. The contrast has been attributed in part to morphophonological properties, like the Latinate form of donate, and in part to semantic properties, like the fact that wash does not imply a transfer of possession (Oehrle 1976). In this paper, I propose that another constraint on verb distribution, the Target/Subject Matter (T/SM) restriction (Pesetsky 1995), also arises from a combination of morphological and semantic factors. I argue that semantic selectional restrictions rule out certain derivations that would give rise to a T/SM violation, while morphological selectional restrictions guide the pronunciation of the well-formed derivations. This conclusion supports the position of Distributed Morphology that semantic, but not morphological information is available during the syntactic derivation (Halle & Marantz 1993).