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GRAMMATICALIZING ASPECT AND AFFECTEDNESS by Carol Lee Tenny B.A., Oberlin College (1977) Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTIT!'TE OF TECHNOLOGY August 1987 Q Carol Lee Tenny !987 The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute copies of this thesis document in whole or in part. Signature of Author- Department offinguistics and Philosophy August 1987 Certified by_ Kenneth Hale Thesis Supervisor Accepted by Morris Halle M4 A SSFUTrsNs)airman, Departmental Committee OCT 2 3 1987 LIBRARIES rCalvd IMLh ,- 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 MITLibraries http://Iibraries.mit.edu/ask DISCLAIMER NOTICE Due to the condition of the original material, there are unavoidable flaws in this reproduction. We have made every effort possible to provide you with the best copy available. Thank you. Some pages in the original document contain text that runs off the edge of the page. Missing Page Number 149 Grammaticalizing Aspect and Affectedness by Carol Lee Tenny Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy on August 24, 1987 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics ABSTRACT This thesis is an investigation of the interaction of aspect and syntax. More particularly, the syntactic repercussions of the aspectual property of delimitedness are examined. Delimitedness -- the temporal boundedess of an event -- is shown to have an effect on a wide range of syntactic phenomena, including resultative secondary predicates, verb-particle constructions, and certain case phenomena. Affectedness is also shown to depend on delimitedness. The interaction between affectedness and syntax is proposed to take place in the Case module of the grammar. An analysis of the property of affectedness in aspectual terms leads to a theory in which the direct argument of a verb 'measures out' the event described by the verb over time, as if on a scale. Affected arguments are direct arguments that delimit the event on that scale. Non-affected direct arguments also 'measure out' the event, though they do not delimit it. This aspectual property of direct arguments is the first of a set of aspectual principles of argument structure. Three additional principles are proposed: An event may be delimited only by its internal arguments -- arguments within the verb phrase at deep structure. Indirect arguments may delimit the event parasitically through the direct argument, while external arguments may not delimit the event at all. Secondly, there may be only one 'delimiting' to a verb phrase. And finally, secondary objects are always delimiting elements. Two specifically syntactic issues are addressed. First, it is proposed that aspect is a syntactic category, and several possible instantiations of aspect in phrase structure are discussed. Secondly, the aspectual principles of argument structure are applied to verb-particle constructions, resultative secondary predicates, and double object constructions; and these principles are shown to shed some light on the syntactic behavior and structure of these constructions. The usefulness of aspect as a tool for syntactic investigations is demonstrated. -2- The' aspectual principles.of argument structure place constraints on the kind of event participants that can be internal arguments. In this way these principles provide a principled mapping between the 'meaning' of verbs and their syntactic representations. The Aspectual Interface Hypothesis is proposed, which maintains that the two systems 'communicate' only through a common aspectual vocabulary. Under this view only the aspectual information in thematic roles is visible to the syntax, and thematic hierarchies are not necessary in the mapping between 'meaning' and syntax. The Aspectual Interface Hypothesis is consonant with a highly autonomous syntax. Thesis Advisor: Dr. Kenneth Hale Title: Ferrari P. Ward Professor in Linguistics -3- Acknowledgements I wish to thank my committee: my thesis advisor Ken Hale, whose deep appreciation and feel for language was a source of guidance and inspiration; Noam Chomsky, who by challenging me at every turn forced me to struggle for clarity and precision; and Richard Larson, who kept me focused and disciplined, with my feet on the ground. I would like to thank three others who also made special contributions: Sylvain Bromberger, who guided me through the pitfalls of linguistic philosophy (any mistakes in that department are my own); Beth Levin, who read numerous drafts with great care; and Morris Halle, who followed this work with interest, and whose lectures to me about Linguistics always turned out to be lectures on Life. I also received valuable comments and criticisms from: Steven Abney, Jim Higginbotham, John Lumsden, Betsy Ritter, Barry Schein and Peggy Speas. I am grateful to the MIT Lexicon Project and the Nippon Electric Company (and to Jay Keyser -- the mover and shaker) for support and funding of a project on Japanese verbs, in which I participated in the summer of 1985. I am also grateful to the MIT Japan Science and Technology Program and the Athena Language Project for a grant which I was awarded in 1985 to develop a set of parsing rules for Japanese. The members of the MIT linguistics community, full-timers and passers-through, who have contributed in one way or another to my education and experience here are almost too numerous to mention. Here are a few I must thank, with apologies to those whose names slipped through: Steven Abney, Mark Baker, Andy Bares, Maggie Browning, Maggie Carracino, Hyon Sook Choe, Jennifer Cole, Viviene Duprez, David Feldman, Naoki Fukui, Alicia Gorecka, Carol Goslant, Isabelle Haik, Jim Harris, Jim Higginbotham, Ewa Higgins, Alana Johns, Kyle Johnson, Myung Yoon Kang, Kate Kearns, Mary Laughren, Beth Levin, Juliette Levin, John Lumsden, Dinette Massam, Kiyoko Masunaga, Jim McCloskey, Janis Melvold, Shigeru Miyagawa, Shin Oshima, Nancy Peters, Tova Rapoport, Betsy Ritter, Luigi Rizzi, Marc Ryser, Doug Saddy, Mamoru Saito, Barry Schein, Ur Schlonsky, Gabriel Segal, Concepta Siembab, Brian Sietsema, Michelle Sigler, Kelly Sloan, Peggy Speas, Richard Sproat, Donca Steriade, Lisa Travis, Loren Trigo, Robert Van Valin. I also wish to thank the Department of Linguistics for taking me on when, in my late twenties, with a confused history of work and study' behind me, I proposed to do graduate work in a field I had never studied. In spite of all frustrations, I have been grateful for the opportunity to study what fascinates me. -4- For moral support during the writing of this thesis I owe a special thanks to Steve and Nina Abney, Keith Bupp, Jennifer Cole, Kim Jonas, John Lumsden, Kiyoko Masunaga, Jim Page, Ann Renner, Betsy Ritter and her mother, Mrs. Kkthe Ritter, Kelly Sloan; Ruth and Fred Hall, and my parents, brother and sister. Finally, a thanks to the dinosaurs in the Royal Ontario Museum, who gave me my best idea. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Francis Briggs Tenny and Nancy Naramore Tenny, who taught me curiosity, and to do things for the right reasons. "Anybody knows that if you believe what we tell you here it's your own fault." -- Morris Halle -6- Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction 9 1.1 Introduction 9 1.2 Aspect 12 1.3 Delimitedness 17 Appendix: Overview of literature on aspectual verb classes 28 Chapter 2. The Grammatical Reality of Affectedness and 4elimitedness 36 2.1 English verb-particle combinations 36 2.2 English resultative secondary predicates 42 2.3 Finnish accusative and partitive case. 47 2.4 Morphological aspect 51 2.5 Affectedness 58 2.5.1 English middles and noun phrase passivization 59 2.5.2 Japanese numeral quantifiers 63 2.5.3 Total affectedness 66 2.5.4 Affectedness and transitivity 69 Chapter 3. An Aspectual Theory of Affectedness 75 3.1 Affectedness as an aspectual property 75 3.1.1 Verbs of consumption and creation 76 3.1.2 Verbs of change of physical state 87 3.1.3 Verbs of abstract change of state 99 3.1.4 Achievement verbs 100 3.1.5 Verbs of motion 102 3.1.6 Affectedness as an aspec+4al property 105 3.2 Lexical entries for affectedness verbs 107 3.3 Affectedness and the compositionality of delimitedness 112 3.3.1 Translation of spatial delimitedness into temporal delimitedness 112 3.3.2 Parallels between the count/mass and delimited/non-delimited distinctions 120 3.3.3 Some semantic approaches to the compositionality of delimitedness: Verkuyl, Hinrichs, Dowty 125 3.4 Total affectedness 137 3.5 Delimitedness and case 142 Chapter 4. Aspectual Principles of Argument Structure 147 4.1 Introduction 147 4.2 Direct arguments 149 4.2.1 Verbs of imparting motion 151 4.2.2 Unergatives, reflexives and cognate objects 153 4.2.3 Verbs describing events with no change in the internal argument 155 4.2.4 Conative and antipassive alternations 158 4.3 External arguments 162 -7- 4.3.1 External arguments and thematic roles 162 4.3.2 External arguments and the translation of spatial delimitedness into temporal delimitedness 174 4.3.3 Summary 179 4.4 Oblique arguments 179 4.4.1 Delimiting oblique arguments 180 4.4.2 A delimiting requirement on secondary arguments 185 4.5 Summary 189 Chapter 5. Syntax of a Theory of Aspect 191 5.1 Introduction 191 5.2 Aspect and phrase structure 193 5.2.1 Semantic independence of tense/modality and aspect 194 5.2.2 Syntactic independence of tense/modality and aspect 202 5.2.3 Against a purely featural approach to aspect