Parameterizing Passive Participle Movement

The parametric difference between English & Italian seen in the contrast between There've been some men arrested & its Italian equivalent Sono stati arrestati alcuni uomini is attributed to participle raising in Italian, not to movement of the associated determiner phrase (DP) in English as suggested by Howard Lasnik (1995). Adopting Guglielmo Cinque's (1999) claim of universal adverb positions, evidence of adverb placement is adduced to show that all Italian participles raise higher than English active participles (including unaccusatives of the type arisen), whereas English passive participles remain in the V position. The parameterization that accounts for this difference involves the relative strength of verb features on the focus & voice heads; the former is strong in Italian & weak in English, whereas in English the active variant of the voice head has a strong verb feature contrasting with a weak feature on the passive variant. 35 References. J. Hitchcock