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Title:
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Degrees of Event Elaboration: Passive constructions in Italian and Spanish
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Author:
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Andrea Sansò
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://lettere.unipv.it/diplinguistica/docenti.php?&id=234
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Pavia
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2001
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
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Subject Language(s):
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Dutch
German, Standard
Italian
Polish
Spanish
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Director(s):
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Pierluigi Cuzzolin
Silvia Luraghi
Giacomo Ferrari
Anna Ramat
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Abstract:
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Research on Italian and Spanish passive constructions has been normally conducted along the lines of formal linguistic theories. As a result, the discourse patterns followed by these constructions have generally escaped attention. This dissertation attempts to fill such a gap. It provides a systematic account of the usage and distribution of passive constructions in Italian and Spanish texts.
The four passive constructions examined in the present work (two periphrastic passives and two middle-marker constructions) differ from one another in both the prominence they assign to agent and patient and the degree of specificity to which they represent the event denoted by the verb. The detailed corpus analysis conducted in this work will make these differences clear.
A secondary aim of this work is to show that the integration of cognitive and typological insights pursued by the methodology of semantic maps constitutes the basis for important generalizations about the semantics of passive constructions across languages. A chapter of the dissertation is therefore devoted to passive and impersonal contructions in Dutch, German, and Polish. Data from these three languages corroborate the semantic analysis proposed for Italian and Spanish passive constructions.
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