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Situations and Syntactic Structures MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
Situations and Syntactic Structures Rethinking Auxiliaries and Order in English
Gillian Ramchand
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
c 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ????
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Contents
1 Introduction to Events and Situations in Grammar 1 1.1 Linguistic Generalizations and Constraints on the Syn-Sem Mapping 3 1.2 Event Properties and Event Instantiations 8 1.2.1 Philosophical Antecedents 9 1.2.2 A Quotational Semantics for Natural Language 15 1.3 The Grammar of Auxiliation 22 1.3.1 Ordering 22 1.3.2 Lexical Specification and Polysemy 23 1.4 Morphology and Spanning 27 1.5 Roadmap 37 2 The Progressive in English 41 2.1 The Syntax of the Progressive: The Progressive is in the First Phase 42 2.1.1 Expletive Associates 43 2.1.2 VP fronting and pseudoclefts 44 2.1.3 British nonfinite do-substitution 45 2.2 The Semantics of the Progressive 49 2.3 The Present Proposal 59 2.3.1 The Progressive as an ‘Identifying State’ 60 2.3.2 Relating Event Properties to Situational Particulars 64 2.4 Conclusion 72 3 The Passive and its Participle 75 3.1 The Stative Participle in -en/ed 77 3.1.1 Event Implications 78 3.1.2 An Implementation in Terms of Reduced Spans 84 3.2 The Eventive Passive 95 3.2.1 Blocking 98 3.2.2 Interaction of Passive and Progressive within EvtP 104 3.2.3 Adjectivalization 107 MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
viii Contents
4 The Participle, the Perfect and the Temporal Domain 113 4.1 Semantic Background to the English Perfect 116 4.1.1 Aktionsart Sensitivity 119 4.1.2 Temporal Modification and the Present Perfect Puzzle 121 4.1.3 Lifetime Effects and Current Relevance 122 4.2 The Proposal 124 4.2.1 Accounting for the Pragmatic/Lifetime Effects 129 4.2.2 Temporal Modification and the Perfect 133 4.3 Summary 137 5 Modals and the Situational Domain 145 5.1 Introduction 145 5.2 What We Know: Syntax 147 5.2.1 Thematic Relations: ‘Raising’ vs.‘Control’ 151 5.2.2 Scope wrt to a Quantified Subject 152 5.2.3 Modals and Symmetric Predicates 153 5.2.4 Ordering and Typology 155 5.2.5 Taking Stock 158 5.3 Interaction with Negation 159 5.3.1 English Modals are Idiosyncratic 160 5.3.2 A Semantic Account of the Idiosyncrasy? 163 5.4 Semantic Properties of Modals 167 5.4.1 The Classical Theory 167 5.5 Circumstantial Modals as Modifiers of Spatiotemporal Properties 174 5.6 Conclusion 183 6 Modals and Generalized Anchoring 185 6.1 Temporal Properties of Modals 186 6.2 Epistemic Modals as Modifiers of Assertions 196 6.2.1 Aktionsart Sensitivity of Epistemic Modals 199 6.2.2 Modals Embedding the Perfect 203 6.3 Evidence for Choice among L -A as Basic to Modal Meaning 206 6.3.1 Relation to Dynamic Modal Interpretations 206 6.3.2 The Semantic ‘weakness’ of Universal Modals. 207 6.3.3 The Puzzle of Deontic Modality and its interaction with Disjunction. (The Paradox of Free Choice Disjunction (Ross 1941)) 209 6.4 Conclusion 210 7 Epilogue 215 7.1 Architecture and Semantic Zones 215 7.2 Insertion: Lexical vs. Functional Items 219 7.3 Summary of the Pieces 221 7.4 Auxiliary Ordering Revisited 226 MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
7.5 Open Questions and Further Research 228 7.5.1 The Nominal Domain 228 7.5.2 On the Universal vs. the Language Specific 229 7.5.3 The Future and the Search for Explanations 230 Bibliography 231 MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
1 Introduction to Events and Situations in Grammar
The primary reason for the use of events in the semantics of natural language is empirical. Starting with Davidson (1967), there is by now a large body of evidence that they are necessary ingredients in the most empirically adequate descriptions of the way language works. The obvious application is in the se- mantics of verbs themselves, a class of words found in every natural language we know of (see Baker 2003). What has been more controversial, and where there are still open and lively debates, is the exact nature of the interpreta- tional ontology, and how it connects to the compositional semantics of natural language. My purpose in this book is not to argue for the existence of verbal events per se, or particular details concerning their nature and internal structure (I refer the reader to Truswell, to appear, for the state of the art). It is however, a book that relates directly to issues of semantic ontology, and the way we set up our compositional semantics so as to be properly integrated with robust facts about the syntax and morphology of natural language. Verbal meanings are remarkably diverse, albeit within certain constrained abstract limits.1 At a very basic level, we need a place-holder variable as the unity to which the different core properties of an event description can be as- cribed. This is what I take to be the fundamental insight of Davidson (1967). We also need, at the end of the day, to be able to construct arbitrarily com- plex coherent and unified descriptions of the world, and assert their existence. These coherent unified situations are built up cumulatively from a combina- tion of the verb and its arguments (intuitively, the ‘core’ davidsonian event) together with all the adverbial, prepositional and modificatory devices at a lan- guage’s disposal.
1 For example, they contain at most one force-dynamical change, at most one direct causer, and at most one specified result state. See Ramchand (2008) for discussion. MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
2 Chapter 1 Introduction to Events and Situations in Grammar
Now, while full propositional content at the sentence level can indeed be modeled by situations (as argued initially by the pioneering work in Barwise and Perry 1983), it is a separate step to say that situations should be given status as part of our object language in semantic description. The second step does appear to me to be warranted, and the evidence for the ontological real- ity of situations is persuasive. As noted in Kratzer (2014) ‘examples can be constructed to show that natural languages have the full expressive power of object language quantification over situations’. Situations and Austinian ‘topic situations’ (Austin 1950) seem to be needed to account for: (i) truth conditions in context, (ii) tense marking (Klein 1994), and (iii) are necessary in a variety of ways for quantifier domain restriction (see Kratzer 2014 for details). I will take it then that we have linguistic evidence for the reality of event descriptions from the core properties of verbs and verbal meanings, and we also have evidence from a wide variety of discourse level effects for the reality of situations. But are Davidsonian events and situations the same thing? And what is the relationship between the verb denotation and the rich situational description that eventually gets established at the sentence level? The answer given in Kratzer (2014) is that events and situations are indeed exactly the same ontological type, but that events are minimal situations. In her view, the notion of exemplification mediates the relation between propositions and Davidsonian events, and makes explicit how the latter relate to situations more generally. I repeat the definition from Kratzer (2014) below in (1).
(1) Exemplification A situation s exemplifies a proposition p iff whenever there is a part of s in which p is not true, then s is a minimal situation in which p is true.
The intuition is that a situation is something that propositions can be ‘true in’, but a situation exemplifies a proposition if it is the minimal such situation, with no extraneous, unnecessary parts. It is the ‘minimal’ situation that makes the proposition true. If we incorporate Davidsonian event semantics into situation talk in this way, we get (2) as the representation of a sentence such as Ewan swam for 10 hours., which is taken from Kratzer (2014).
(2) ls[past(s) e[e s swim(Ewan)(e) fhour(e) = 10]] ^9 p ^ ^ So the sentence here is a property of situations such that the situation is ‘in the past’ and there is an event that is a subpart of it which is the exemplification of MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
Ewan swimming. The temporal measure of the exemplified event in hours is 10. Here we see that both situations and events can be arguments of temporal modifiers. One could also break down events/situations into their temporal run times and explicitly predicate the temporal predicates of these intervals instead, or we state it as above and allow the specification of the temporal predicate to make this precise. The important point here is that events/situations in this system have temporal parameters and temporal properties can be ascribed to them. According to Kratzer (2014), the formula above ”.... incorporates the usual notation for Davidsonian event predication. Within a situation semantics, this notation is just a convenient way to convey that swim(Ewan)(e) is to be in- terpreted in terms of exemplification: we are not talking about situations in which Ewan swims, but about situations that exemplify the proposition ’Ewan swims’. ” (my italics). For Kratzer, an event is ontologically the same kind of animal as a situation, but it is one that stands in the exemplification relation to a particular kind of atomic proposition (namely, the ones that we usually assume are the introduc- ers of Davidsonian events). So in this way, Kratzer is in fact relating the use of the term event to something independent about the syntax. In effect, if a propo- sition comes from the interpretation of vP then it corresponds to ‘event’, while if it comes from a larger syntactic phrase then it corresponds to ‘situation’. This however has no real effect on the semantic ontology. The problem with the standard view as described above is that it underplays the differences between the semantics of the inner vP (what I have elsewhere called the ‘first phase’ Ramchand 2008) and the higher parts of the clause. To understand what I mean by this, it is necessary to briefly discuss certain typological patterns in linguistic forms.
1.1 Linguistic Generalizations and Constraints on the Syn-Sem Mapping It is a truism perhaps that the syntactic representations of natural language need to be given a compositional interpretation (cf. Heim and Kratzer 1998). How- ever, the standard mechanisms used in formal semantics for modeling compo- sitional interpretation are in fact extremely powerful. The unfettered lambda calculus, endowed with abstraction over predicates of higher types can put any jumble of words or structures together to deliver the final desired output reflecting our description of the intuitive truth conditions (see Higginbotham 2007). The notation itself overgenerates in the absence of explicit constraining principles. Explicit constraining principles after all are the job of linguists, not of the notation. MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
4 Chapter 1 Introduction to Events and Situations in Grammar
So what constraining principles do we need? Ideally, in my view, we need to build a compositional semantics of the clause that makes the deep and uncon- troversial generalizations about verb meaning fall out as a natural consequence. In Ramchand (2016), I argued that we need the compositional semantics of the vP to reflect the universal hierarchical structuring of causal embedding. In this monograph, I pursue the logic further and take seriously the typological fact that natural languages universally encode temporal information hierarchially outside of the causal and force dynamical content of the event itself. This uni- versal fact about semantics is rarely perceived as such because it has already been reified as ‘syntactic’ fact in the form of a phrase structure template: CP > TP > VP. The template with these three zones is as much a template as any more articulated cartography (cf. also Ramchand and Svenonius 2014 for dis- cussion), and at this stage of our understanding simply has to be stipulated. It follows from nothing else. Unfortunately, it also does not fall out from event semantics, under any current understanding of the term. This is because, on current understanding, events (and situations) as well as trafficking in notions such as ‘causation’ and ‘agent’, also have properties related to time because they are particulars with a particular time course. Consider a hypothetical language spoken on the planet Zog. The planet Zog is a world very different from our own, inhabited by many strange living crea- tures, one species of which have acquired symbolic thought and speak their own form of language. This is Zoggian, and it has properties found in no hu- man language. In particular, we find the bound morpheme /fub/2 which denotes roughly ‘the process of dissolving into a green slimy puddle’. In addition, we find the bound morpheme -ax- which has the semantics of P and the bound morpheme ilka which has the semantics of C . Like human languages, Zoggian works by generating hierarchical symbolic structures with predictable interpretations. However, unlike Human, the P morpheme always occurs hierarchically closer to the conceptually rich part of the verbal meaning than the C morpheme does. The relevant sentences of Zoggian follow in (3). (Note also in passing that Zoggian’s basic word order is OSV).
(3) blixa fub-ax the.house dissolvegreen- ‘The house dissolved into a green slimy puddle.’
2 As a simplification, and for the purposes of exposition, I will translate all Zoggian forms into IPA, and use descriptive terms from human linguistics. In fact, Zoggian does utilize an auditory channel but one which is not perceptible to the human ear. MITPress Linguistics.cls LATEXBookStyle TypesetwithPDFLaTeX Size:6x9 June22,2017 2:03pm
(4) blixa marrg fub-ax-ilka the.house the.zog dissolvegreen- - The zog dissolved the house into a green slimy puddle.
The tree structure for the sentence in (4-b) is given below in (5)
(5)
causeP
‘the zog’
C
P vP
‘dissolved the house’
Suppose further, that it turns out that there are many Zoggian language fam- ilies but with very few exceptions, Cause appears external to temporal infor- mation. This is no problem for a compositional semantics. Indeed, it is no problem for the semantics developed for Human languages either. For exam- ple, simple denotations for the Verb, Cause and Past morphemes could be given as in (6) below.
(6) (i) [[ vP ]] = le[fub(e) Undergoer(e) = ‘the house’] ^ (ii) [[ ]] = le[ t(e)