Affected Experiencers and Mixed Semantics in LFG/Glue

Bosse, Bruening and Yamada (2012) (BBY) provides a study of several constructions involving 'non-selected' arguments, and outlines an approach to the syntax and semantics of one such construction: the Affected Experiencer (AE) construction. The syntactic analysis relies on abstract functional projections and particular assumptions about configurational syntax. We show how an account may be given without these syntactic assumptions. Semantically, BBY argue that AEs may contribute both at-issue content and conventional implicatures, which raises interesting issues for the approach of e.g. Potts (2005). We explore some consequences of their semantic analysis and show that it faces a number of difficulties.