Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-219) and index.
1. The ergative analysis and the unaccusative hypothesis -- 2. Expletive inversion -- 3. Partitive cliticization -- 4. Bare subjects -- 5. Perfect auxiliary selection -- 6. Past participle agreement -- 7. Participial absolutes -- 8. Conclusion
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"In this book the author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics regarding such matters as auxiliary selection, partitive cliticization, bare subjects, participle agreement, and more. For the last two decades the ergative/unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. Ian Mackenzie re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan, and concludes that it is essentially unmotivated."--BOOK JACKET.