The English Patient in its sentential aspect

[iabervon]

A tale of love, betrayal, and politics surrounding a pilot whose plane crashed and burnt in the Sahara Desert unfolds in a series of example sentences illustrating Burzio's generalization and the Unaccusative Hypothesis as he arrives, collapses, and ultimately dies.

Comments

[lyonesse]

unexploded armaments and syntactically misformed structures are marked with asterisks (*).

[iabervon]

The English Patient is a tale of love, etc., which is told in a series of flashbacks (as well as action in the present).

The English noun phase in its sentential aspect is an influential linguistics dissertation, both with respect to the theory it proposed and with respect to the catchiness of its title for parody.

The patient is the role in a clause of the entity affected by the action, when that entity does not cause the action, the entity causing the action being assigned the role of agent regardless of other relationships to the action.

Burzio's Generalization states that, across languages, a clause whose verb lacks its normal subject cannot have a direct object (or certain types of indirect object