Extra argumentality--affectees, landmarks, and voice *.
Hole, Daniel
Abstract
This article investigates sentences with additional core arguments
of a special type in three languages, viz. German, English, and
Mandarin. These additional arguments, called extra arguments in the
article, form a cross-linguistically homogeneous class by virtue of
their structural and semantic similarities, with so-called "raised
possessors" forming just a sub-group among them. Structurally,
extra arguments may not be the most deeply embedded arguments in a
sentence. Semantically, their referents are felt to stand in a specific
relation to the referent of the / a more deeply embedded argument. There
are two major thematic relations that are instantiated by extra
arguments, viz. affectees and landmarks. These thematic role notions are
justified in the context of and partly in contrast to, Dowty's
(1991) proto-role approach. An affeetee combines proto-agent with
proto-patient properties in eventualities that are construed as
involving causation. A landmark is a ground with respect to some spatial
configuration denoted by the predication at hand, but a figure at the
highest level of gestalt partitioning that is relevant in a clause.
Thereby, both affectees and landmarks are inherently hybrid categories.
The account of extra argumentality is couched in a neo-Davidsonian event
semantics in the spirit of Kratzer (1996, 2003), and voice heads are
assumed to introduce affectee arguments and landmark arguments right
above VP.
1. The topic: extra argumentality and interparticipant relations
The sentences in (1) from Mandarin, English, and German share a
number of properties. (1)
(1) a. Ta si-le muqin.
(s)he die-PRF mother
'His/her mother died on him.'
b. The ship tore one of its sails.
c. Hans schrubbte Paul den Rucken.
Hans scrubbed Paul.DAT the back
'Hans scrubbed Paul's back.'/lit. 'Hans
scrubbed [sup.dat]Paul [sup.acc]the back.'
First, the italicized arguments (subjects in [1a] and [1b], an
indirect object in [1c]) are unexpected if one considers the canonical
argument structure of each verb, and if one considers the thematic
relations typically associated with eventualities encoded by these
verbs. For instance, verbs denoting events of dying are not typically
construed as (noncausative) transitive verbs, as is the case in (1a).
Second, the referents of the italicized arguments are felt to stand
in a special relationship to the referents of the more deeply embedded
and ccommanded arguments muqin 'mother', one of its sails, and
den Rucken 'the back'. The relations in (1) are kinship,
part/whole, and inalienable possession. These relationships will
provisionally be called "interparticipant relations" before
their implementation in terms of predicate abstraction and variable
identification is put forward in the second half of the article. The
very same interparticipant relations that are instantiated in (1)
between syntactic core functions may also occur between subjects or
objects and PPs; an example from English would be She stared him in the
eyes. In order to keep the empirical domain of this pilot study
manageable, only predications with non-PP complements will be taken into
consideration. This move should, however, be regarded as provisional.
Unexpected arguments with syntactic core functions of the above
kind will henceforth be called "extra arguments," and they are
invariably italicized.
For (1a) and (1b) a further characteristic frequently encountered
with extra arguments holds: the extra arguments may fulfill syntactic
functions that are canonically assumed by the more deeply embedded
arguments. Thus, in (1a) and (1b) the extra arguments are subjects, even
though from the point of view of canonical intransitive uses of the
respective verbs one would expect the other argument to appear in
subject position.
Sentences as in (1) have been dealt with in very different
frameworks and from many different perspectives, but to the best of my
knowledge, precisely that array of data that we'll be concerned
with and which I take to constitute a crosslinguistically homogeneous
phenomenon has never been under scrutiny. In Section 2, I will
critically review results from several frameworks in which data as in
(1) have been analyzed, most notably the possessor raising or ascension analyses in the tradition of relational grammar. Section 3 will provide
the empirical survey of relevant sentence patterns in German, Mandarin,
and English. These three languages have been chosen for exemplification for no particular reason, except that I have a sufficient command of
each of them, which allows me to base my argumentation not just on the
literature and work with consultants but also on intuitions of my own.
In Section 4 the focus of interest shifts from the presentation of data
to the semantic modeling of extra argumentality. I will introduce the
implementation for "possessor" datives of German in terms of a
Kratzerian voice semantics (Kratzer 1996, 2003) as put forward in Hole
(2005), and we will check which portion of the data from Section 3 can
be covered by this kind of analysis. The last major section will deal
with the amendments that are necessary to extend the voice analysis of
Section 4 to the other cases of extra argumentality. In the course of
this extension a major division between predicate types will be
introduced: (i) predicates instantiating the proto-agent/proto-patient
scheme in the sense of Dowty (1991), which is rooted in concepts like
volitionality, control, and causality, and (ii) predicates denoting
locative eventualities, whose participants are mapped to figures and
grounds. The figure/ground distinction is usually filtered out as
thematically irrelevant in the literature, and I will reopen the
discussion about this issue. As a result, the claim is put forward that
the agent/patient dichotomy and the figure/ground partitioning are two
ways of mental and linguistic construal which are treated on a par by
grammars of natural languages.
This article is designed as a pilot study, and therefore it fails
to define its empirical domain in a strictly deductionist manner. There
remains something ostensive about the delimitation of the relevant data.
But it seems to me to be beyond doubt that the data assembled here
should be subjected to a uniform treatment. Even though we will come to
call the relevant domain "voice" beginning with Section 4, the
collection of necessary conditions for our voice phenomena will not
reach the point where necessary-and-sufficient conditions can be stated.
Still, the insights that emerge along the way render the project, I
think, sufficiently interesting for the theoretician and the
descriptivist alike to merit treatment in an article like this.
2. Arguments against possessor raising approaches
The most influential approach to the grammatical modeling of facts
as in (1c) dates back to Perlmutter and Postal's (1983) (the paper
has been circulating since 1974) seminal idea that such facts should be
treated as phenomena akin to passives and raising structures. On some
nonsurface level of derivation, some argument of a sentence has a
syntactic position lower in the tree than in the surface version of the
sentence. (See also Isacenko [1965] for a much earlier generative account in the same vein.) In the case of the passive, the direct object
(or "initial 2" in relational grammar) becomes the subject. In
the case of possessor raising, a possessor nominal which is
base-generated as a constituent within some argument constituent (often
a direct object in European languages) is raised or ascended to assume a
syntactic function of its own (often the function of an indirect object
in European languages). Take (2) from German as an example.
(2) a. Paul zerbrach ihr die Brille.
Paul broke her.DAT the glasses
'Paul broke her glasses (on her).'
b. Paul zerbrach ihre Brille.
Paul broke her glasses
'Paul broke her glasses.'
On the possessor ascension analysis, (2a) is derived from (some
underlying version of) the more basic (2b). Specifically, the possessor
of the glasses, which is expressed as a determining modifier in (2b),
becomes the indirect dative object in (2a). The large number of papers
treating phenomena in individual languages in terms of possessor raising
or possessor ascension is proof of the strong impact that the idea of
possessor raising has had over the decades, and this impact has not at
all been limited to Generative (sub)paradigms (cf. to name just a few:
Aissen 1987; Fox 1981; Gallmann 1992; Keenan and Ralalaoherivony 2000;
Landau 1999; some of the contributions to Perlmutter 1983 or Perlmutter
and Joseph 1990). (2) This holds despite Bresnan's (1983) seminal
lexical-functional paper which fostered growing reservations against
raising analyses in other areas. But since Bresnan did not treat extra
argumentality in her paper, the ascension/raising analyses remained--on
the whole--unchallenged. Apart from the partially theory-dependent
arguments exchanged by generative and lexical-functional grammarians,
there are empirical reasons to discard any kind of possessor ascension
analysis. We will turn to them in Section 2.
Wunderlich (1996, 2000) defends a view of "possessor"
datives in German which might be characterized as involving
"lexical possessor raising." Even though there is no level of
syntactic analysis in his approach at which the dative arguments are
constituents of the possessum DP, the semantics interprets them just
like DP-internal possessors. (3) is an example.
(3) a. Sie wusch ihm die Fusse.
she washed him.DAT the feet
'She washed his feet.'
b. [lambda]y[lambda]z[lambda]x[lambda]s {WASH(x,y) &
POSS(z,y)}(s) (3) (Wunderlich 1996: 339)
(3b) is Wunderlich's representation of the semantics of wasch-
'wash' which has been derived in such a way that the
integration of a dative argument becomes possible. After the arguments
have been inserted (or their slots have been bound), the truth
conditions for (3a) will then come out as follows: 'There was an
event of her washing the feet, and the feet belong to him'. In
typological studies of the recent past, the terminology of
"external" vs. "internal" possession has gained
ground (Konig and Haspelmath 1998; Payne and Barshi 1999; the
terminology dates back to Vergnaud and Zubizarreta 1992, but this latter
paper was written in the government and binding paradigm; more on it
will be said in Section 4.3.2). Whenever a person (as opposed to a body
part) or a possessor is encoded as an extra argument, this is called
external possession, and whenever the possessor term and the possessum
term form a single complex DP constituent, this is a case of internal
possession. Inasmuch as generalizations in this terminological paradigm
rest on the assignment of the possessor role to external
possessors/extra arguments, the same objections as will be stated in
Sections 2.3 and 2.4 can be used to criticize this analysis. While
typological analyses of extra argumentality in terms of external
possession are less committed syntactically than the possessor raising
solutions, they have greatly enlarged our knowledge of the typical
semantic differences between external possession or extra argument
constructions and internal possession constructions across languages.
(4,5) Let us now turn to the problems that accounts of extra
argumentality in terms of syntactic or lexical possessor
raising/ascension face.
2.1. The dead possessor argument (6)
If the extra argument in a sentence like (4b) were a possessor, it
would be a mystery why its use renders sentences deviant if the alleged
possessor is not alive anymore, since bona fide possessors in genitival
constructions as in (4a) are not deviant if their referents are not
alive or sentient anymore. A similar point is made in (5) for English,
where the contrast arises between a sentient/conscious whole (him) and a
nonsentient whole (the leg). (7)
(4) [Paul died first.]
a. Dann starb auch seine Mutter.
then died also his mother
'Then his mother died, too.'
b. #Dann starb ibm auch seine Mutter.
then died him.DAT also his mother
'Then his mother died on him, too.'
(5) She kicked him/#the leg in the shin.
The contrast in (4) is easily reproduced in Mandarin (cf. [6]), the
difference being that the extra argument is a subject in Mandarin, and
not a dative as in the German example. (See Section 3.1 and, in
particular, example [14] for evidence that ta '(s)he' is a
subject, and not just a topic, in [6b].)
(6) [Paul died first.]
a. Houlai, tade muqin ye side.
afterwards his mother also die-PRF
'Then his mother died, too.'
b. #Houlai, ta ye side muqin.
afterwards he also die-PRF mother
'Then his mother died on him, too.'
I assume that both the dative argument in the German examples and
the subject argument in the Mandarin example instantiate the thematic
role affectee, with affectee being a thematic relation which combines at
least one proto-agent property (sentience/consciousness), and one
proto-patient property (causal affectedness) in the sense of Dowty
(1991) (cf. also Primus' [1999] proto-recipient). We will
repeatedly return to Dowty's theory of proto-roles below; at the
present point, a preliminary understanding of Dowty's notions is
sufficient.
Lexical possessor raising a la Wunderlich (1996, 2000) is faced
with the same kind of problem. While it may be possible to write a
special condition into the semantics of the poss predicate in (3b) which
takes care of the semantic restriction under discussion here, this
restriction wouldn't follow from anything that we know about
DP-internal possessors, thereby weakening the claim that
extra-argumental participants may be reduced to possessorhood without
any special amendments.
2.2. The dative passive argument
The German dative passive is formed with the passive auxiliary
bekommen (or kriegen) 'get' and the past participle of a verb.
Dative arguments of active sentences are encoded as subjects while the
direct objects remain unaffected (Reis 1985; Leirbukt 1997). The subject
of the active sentence is demoted to an optional PP. The passive
sentence in (7b) exemplifies this construction by opposing it to the
corresponding active sentence in (7a).
(7) a. Die Wachen offneten [[dem Angreifer].sub.DAT] das Tor.
the guards opened the.DAT attacker the gate
'The guards opened the gate for the attacker.'
b. [[er Angreifer].sub.NOM] bekam das Tor (yon den Wachen)
the attacker got the gate by the guards
geoffnet.
opened
'The guards opened the gate for the attacker.'/lit.
'The attacker got the gate opened (by the guards).'
Not just any dative going along with an active verb can become the
subject of a dative passive. There is a constraint requiring the
subjects of such passives to be affectees as characterized in the
preceding subsection. Therefore, as witnessed by (8b), (8a) doesn't
have a good dative passive counterpart.
(8) a. Die Zensur offnete [[er Beeinflussung].sub.DAT] das
the censorship opened the.DAT manipulation the
Tor.
gate
'Censorship opened the floodgates to manipulation.'
b. #[Die Beeinflussung] bekam das Tor geoffnet.
the manipulation got he gate opened
lit. 'Manipulation got the gate opened.'
The referent of die Beeinflussung 'the manipulation' is
not consciously or sentiently involved in the event at hand, therefore
the dative passive in (8b) is out. Now consider (9) and (10). Extra
dative arguments regularly become the subjects of dative passives, and
in my own dialect this is true of all extra dative arguments.
(9) a. Die Arztin hat [[Paula].sub.DAT] Blut abgenommen.
the doctor has Paula blood taken
'The doctor took some of Paula's blood.'
b. [[Paula].sub.NOM] hat (von der Arztin) Blut abgenommen
Paula has by the doctor blood taken
bekommen.
got
'The doctor took some of Paula's blood.'
(10) a. Sic streichelte [[dem Jungen].sub.DAT] den Arm.
she stroked the.DAT boy the arm
'She stroked the boy's arm.'
b. [[Der Junge].sub.NOM] bekam (von ihr) den Arm
the boy got by her the arm
gestreichelt.
stroked
'She stroked the boy's arm.'
If dative passives are only grammatical with subjects whose
referents are affectees, extra arguments must be affectees, too. We will
therefore have to say that affectee, but not possessor, is the correct
thematic relation of the pertinent extra dative arguments in German. A
parallel argument can be made for the Chinese passive promoting indirect
objects or immediately postverbal extra arguments to subject function.
Turn to Section 3.2 (examples [16] and [16']) for the relevant
data.
Again, lexical possessor raising as defended by Wunderlich (1996,
2000) (cf. [3b]) will have essentially the same problem; possession
alone does not single out a natural class for the phenomenon of German
dative passives and analogous constructions in other languages and does
not, therefore, seem to be the relevant notion to explicate the observed
link between many extra arguments and dative passives.
2.3. Presupposition vs. entailment (8)
The relation of possession felt to hold between the referent of the
extra argument and the referent of the more deeply embedded argument is
presupposed. If the extra argument encoded a possessor, it would be the
only kind of verbal argument that I know of which conveys presupposed
information. This in itself speaks against extra dative arguments as
encoding the possessor role. The affectee information conveyed by extra
dative arguments in German (cf. Section 2.1) is, however, part of the
assertion and, thus, entailed. (11) with a dative extra argument in a
conditional clause illustrates the difference.
(11) a. Falls die Schwester dem Patienten auf den Mantel
if the nurse the.DAT patient on the coat
tritt, ...
steps
'If the nurse steps on the patient's coat ...'/
lit.: 'If the nurse steps the patient on the coat ...'
b. presupposition: 'The patient possesses a coat, and he is
wearing it, is keeping it close to his body, or is locally related to it
in some other way.'
c. lost entailment: 'The patient is consciously involved in an
event in which he is causally affected.'
As expected in if-clauses, the presupposition persists, while the
entailment is lost. On the assumption that the dative argument expresses
the affectee involvement of the relevant referent, no problem arises,
because the affectee involvement is just as inactive in (11) as, say,
the agentive involvement of die Schwester 'the nurse'. If we
can make plausible where the presupposed relation of possession has its
source in (11) outside the dative DP, the situation will be a lot easier
to handle. No two thematic involvements of differing information
statuses would have to be expressed by a single DP. In Section 4.2 we
will see how the intuition of possession can be taken care of within the
more deeply embedded DP.
Wunderlich's representation of lexically derived predicates
with a built-in semantics of possession as in (3b) (... WASH(x,y) &
POSS(z,y) ...) does not make mention of the differing kinds of
information status for the two predicates and may, for this reason, too,
not be considered superior to the syntactic possessor raising analyses.
3. The range of syntactic functions of extra arguments
Extra arguments occur in all syntactic functions associated with
verbs, except for the function of the most deeply embedded complement in
a given syntactic structure. We thus find extra arguments that are
subjects or objects. If the extra argument is a direct object, the most
deeply embedded complement is sometimes a (directional) PP, and
sometimes a second object. For the sake of restricting the empirical
domain to be covered in this article, I disregard PP complements (and
also PP extra arguments); extra arguments as objects will always be
followed by a second object in this article (but see Note 9). I will
look at instances of the different syntactic functions of extra
arguments in the following, providing examples from each of the
languages mentioned above (English, German, Mandarin), supplemented by
one Korean example.
3.1. Extra arguments as subjects
Some English sentences with extra arguments in subject function are
listed in (12) (cf. Rohdenburg 1974).
(12) a. The ship tore one of its sails.
b. The car burst a tire.
c. The boy grew breasts.
d. The athlete tore a muscle.
All the examples in (12) feature unaccusative verbs, and the direct
objects are the arguments that would, in the absence of the extra
arguments, figure as the subjects of the sentences. None of the
sentences in (12) involves a causativized use of the intransitive verbs.
Take (12c) for illustration. The sentence does not mean that the boy
grew breasts the way farmers grow tomatoes, it rather states that it
happened to the boy that breasts grew on his chest. In all of the
examples, the extra argument denotes the whole of which the referent of
the more deeply embedded argument constitutes a part. Analogous examples
from Mandarin are provided in (13). (9)
(13) a. Ta diao-le hen duo toufa.
(s)he fall-PRF very much hair
'A lot of his/her hair fell out.'/lit. '(S)he fell
very much hair.'
b. Ta duan-le tui le.
(s)hebreak-PRF leg PRT
'(S)he broke his/her leg.'
It can be shown that the extra arguments are really subjects, and
not Chinese-style topics. Chinese-style topics, because of their
backgrounded discourse status, cannot be focal information in a
question-answer sequence. (10) This is, however, easily possible for ta
'(s)he' as in (13). (14) is a felicitous question-answer pair.
(14) Q: Shei duan-le tui le?
who break-PRF leg PRT
'Who broke his leg?'
A: Ta duan-le tui le.
(s)hebreak-PRF leg PRT
'(S)he broke his/her leg.'
A second argument for the subjecthood of extra arguments in such
sentences is the fact that the internal argument of the unaccusative
verb surfaces as a postverbal complement. This is so because the
preverbal subject function has been "snatched" by the extra
argument. Chinese-style topics do not trigger the in-situ surface
realization of arguments of unaccusative verbs.
3.2. Extra arguments as objects
In German, extra arguments with the function of indirect objects
are the paradigm cases of so-called external possession. (15) is an
example, and (16) presents a structurally similar sentence from
Mandarin.
(15) Die Mutter flocht der Tochter die Haare.
the mother braided the.DAT daughter the hairs
'The mother braided her daughter's hair.'
(16) Xiao Waing chi-le wo yi-ge dangao.
little Wang eat-PRF I 1-CL cake
'Little Wang ate a cake of mine.'
(15) does not require a lot of explanation since we have seen
similar examples above. The hair is part of, or possessed by, the
daughter, and the verb flechten 'braid' is transitive, but not
usually ditransitive. (16) from Mandarin is more of a challenge.
Deviating from the pattern found with verbs of transfer or verbs of
creation in other languages, the referent of the indirect object loses
the cake in (16) instead of getting it, and the verb chi 'eat'
denotes an event in the course of which the cake ceases to exist. It is
easily shown that wo T in (16) is not a modifier of the more deeply
embedded complement (see Zhang 1998a, 1998b for details concerning the
relevant construction in Mandarin). Moreover, it should be noted that,
quite generally, the ditransitive construction with minimal coding
devices (no preposition) in Mandarin is typically found with verbs that
have the referents of the indirect objects lose something, or that
exempt them from something, but only rarely with verbs that have the
referent of the indirect object come into the possession of something.
Among the few verbs of the second kind are the most general verbs of
transfer gei 'give' and song 'give as a present',
which take an indirect and a direct object with the same zero marking as
chi 'eat' in (16). (11) At this point, readers may be
suspicious about the objecthood of the extra arguments in (15) and (16).
Supporting evidence for the claim that we are really dealing with
objects, and not with adjuncts or modifiers, comes from passivization.
As shown in (15') and (16'), the Mandarin and the German extra
argument may each be the subject of a corresponding passive sentence
(cf. also Section 2.1.1 above).
(15') Die Tochter bekam die Haare geflochten.
the daughter got the hairs braided
'The daughter's hair got braided.'
(16') Wo bei chi-le yi-ge dangao.
I PASS eat-PRF 1-CL cake
'I suffered from someone eating a cake of mine.'
I have chosen to present the Mandarin case in (16) as one involving
a sequence of indirect and direct object because Zhang (1998a, 1998b)
uses the same terminology. It is, however, possible that the Mandarin
case really patterns with the double accusative sentences from Korean as
exemplified in (17) (cf. Shibatani 1994: 475).
(17) John-i Mary-lul son-ul ttayli-ess-ta.
John-NOM Mary-ACC hand-Acc hit-PST-IND
'John hit Mary on the hand.'
Mandarin has a peculiar system of preverbal objects marked by the
notoriously controversial functional element ba (see Li [2001] for an
elegant overview of the relevant discussion). Extra arguments are found
in this position, too. To understand these data, we first have to
familiarize ourselves with the way the more typical ba-sentences work,
that is, those ba-sentences not involving extra arguments. Direct
objects are (often obligatorily) shifted into the preverbal ba-position
if other complementational material is to follow the verb, if a
resultative construction is involved, or if, more generally, a highly
transitive event (in the sense of Hopper and Thompson 1980) is encoded.
(18) illustrates the case where either a canonical postverbal object as
in (18a) may be used, or a ba-object as in (18b). As just said, in other
cases speakers do not have a choice. The resulting grammaticality
contrast for such a case is given in (19) (cf. Li and Thompson 1981:
407).
(18) a. Wo chi-wan-le zhei-dun fan.
I eat-up-PRY this-CL food
'I've eaten up that dish.'
b. Wo ba zhei-dun fan chi-wan-le.
I BA this-CL food eat-up-PRY
'I've eaten up that dish.'
(19) a. Wo ba bao-shi cang zai xiangzi-li.
I BA precious-stone hide at chest-in
'I hide the precious stone in a chest.'
b. *Wo cang bao-shi zai xiangzi-li.
I hide precious-stone at chest-in
intended: 'I hide the precious stone in a chest.'
Ba-sentences instantiate extra argumentality if a preverbal
ba-object and a postverbal object co-occur. Examples from, or in the
spirit of, Tsao (1987), who in some cases quotes Cheung (1973), are
given in (20) and (21).
(20) a. Ta ba juzi bo-1e pi.
(s)he BA orange peel-PRF peel
'(S)he removed the peel of the orange.'
b. Tamen ba zhu fang-le xue.
they BA pig release-PRY blood
'They drained the pig of its blood.'
(21) a. Zhangsan ba men shang-le suo.
Zhangsan BA door put.on-vRF lock
'Zhangsan put a lock on the door.'
b. Ta ba bilu sheng-le huo.
(s)he BA fireplace ignite-PRF fire
'(S)he put on a fire in the fireplace.'
(22) Ta ba qiang ti-le yi-ge dong.
(s)he BA wall kick-PRF 1-CL hole
'(S)he kicked a hole into the wall.'
(20) is a collection of examples in which the referent of the extra
argument gets diminished in the course of the encoded event. The
examples in (21) have it that something is added as a part to some
functional whole or location. In the case of (22) it is not immediately
clear whether something is added to the wall or whether its functional
integrity is destroyed by the described event. I will return to this
problem in Section 5.5, but the issue will ultimately be left unsettled.
3.3. Extra arguments as objects with subject-like properties
A special kind of object extra argumentality is found with verbs of
bodily sensation and some psych verbs. To get a better understanding of
the domain, let us start out from a well-known quirky case fact from
Icelandic. Among the Germanic languages, Icelandic is an extreme case in
that it allows for non-nominative subjects with certain verbs. These
non-nominative arguments control coordination reduction. An example is
given in (23) (cf. Faarlund 1999).
(23) Haraldii gedjast vel ad Mariu og [[??].sub.i] bydur henni oft
i Harald.DAT pleases good to Maria and invites her often in bio.
cinema
'Harald likes Maria and often invites her to the movies.'
The facts of coordination reduction clearly show the subject
properties of the dative argument Haraldi. If subjects, and only
subjects, control coordination reduction in Icelandic, then Haraldi in
(23) must be the subject. German dative experiencers are not subjects;
it is the nominative (stimulus) arguments in sentences with psych verbs
that have the morphosyntactic properties of subjects, such as
controlling coordination reduction or triggering agreement on the verb.
In terms of word order things are different, though. The neutral
relative order of nominative arguments on the one hand and dative or
accusative arguments on the other in German psych verb constructions is
as in (24). This means that in psych verb constructions and with many
verbs of bodily sensation, the nominative argument does not have its
canonical position to the left of the accusative or dative argument, but
rather to its right. Thereby, accusative or dative experiencers (with
psych verbs) or affectees (with verbs of bodily sensation) conform to the (tendential) subject property of being the first argument in a
clause (we will turn to the spurious difference between affectees and
experiencers in Section 4.4). (25) is an example, and (25') is the
same example with a different word order, viz. NOM > ACC; the marked
order of this sentence is the unmarked order of the canonical verb
classes (cf. Lenerz 1977; Hohle 1982).
(24) DAT/ACC > NOM
(25) Einem Zeugenist ein Hund aufgefallen.
a.DAT witness is a.NOM dog (be.)noticed
'A witness noticed a dog.'
(25') Ein Hund ist einem Zeugen aufgefallen.
a.NOM dog is a.DAT witness (be.)noticed
'A witness noticed a dog.'
Without going into the details of the arguments from the relevant
literature, let us just note one piece of evidence supporting the claim
of a special neutral word order with such verbs. Typically a focus
accent on the most deeply embedded argument of a sentence with canonical
word order and an unaccusative verb will allow for an interpretation as
an all-new utterance in German even if none of the words without focus
accents are contextually given. This effect does hold for (25) if we
make the assumption that the nominative is the most deeply embedded
argument. If, on the other hand, we put a focus accent on the dative in
(25'), the only possible reading is a narrow focus on einem Zeugen
'a.DAT witness'. (12) With German verbs denoting sensations or
transformations on or in body parts we get both things: (i)
extra-argumentality and (ii) noncanonical neutral word order with the
expected all-new utterance readings with stress on the nominative
argument. (26) lists some examples. (13)
(26) a. Ihm juckt die Kopfhaut.
him.DAT itches the.NOM scalp
'His scalp itches.'
b. Ihr druckt der Magen.
her.DAT presses the.NOM stomach
'Her belly hurts.'
c. Ihm bricht das Herz.
him.DAT breaks the.NOM heart
'His heart is breaking.'
The German equivalent of The boy grew breasts (cf. [12c]) belongs
here, too. I separate it from the examples in (26) because those
sentences all involve changes or perceptions relating to body parts that
already exist. The breasts in (27), however, come into being in the
course of the event described by the verb.
(27) Dem Jungen wuchsen Bruste.
the.DAT boy grew breasts.NOM
'The boy grew breasts.'
With inanimate referents, the acceptability of dative extra
arguments with subject-like properties varies among speakers of German.
Referee B classifies the sentences in (28) as "perfect,"
whereas I prefer the versions in (29).
(28) a. Dem Baum wuchsen neue Aste.
the.PaT tree grew new branches
'The tree grew new branches.'
b. Dem Wagen platzte ein Reifen.
the.DAT car burst a tire
'The car burst a tire.'
(29) a. An dem Baum wuchsen neue Aste.
on the.DAT tree grew new branches
'The tree grew new branches.'
b. An dem Wagen platzte ein Reifen.
on the.PaT car burst a tire
'The car burst a tire.'
I admit that sentences as in (28) do occur and that they do not
necessarily signal metaphorical animacy. Still, a contrast persists in
that PPs as in (29) are always possible with inanimate referents in this
construction; if, however, PPs are used instead of the dative arguments
of (26) and (27), the deviant sentences in (26') and (27') are
the result.
(26') a. *An ihm juckt die Kopfhaut.
on him.DAT itches the.NOM scalp
intended: 'His scalp itches.'
b. *In ihr druckt der Magen.
in her.DAT presses the.NOM stomach
intended: 'Her belly hurts.'
c. *In ihm bricht das Herz.
in him.DAT breaks the.NOM heart
intended: 'His heart is breaking.'
(27') *An dem Jungen wuchsen Bruste.
on the.DAT boy grew breasts.NOM
intended: 'The boy grew breasts.'
The referents of the prepositional complements in (26') and
(27') are clearly construed as inanimate.
This concludes the survey of extra arguments with a syntactic core
function in German, English, and Mandarin.
4. Interparticipant relations
4.1. Modeling interparticipant relations in terms of voice and some
notion of binding
It has become clear in Section 2 that extra arguments will have to
be assigned thematic relations that are dependent on the asserted events
of the sentences in which they occur. This means that, in terms of
thematic relations, Paul in Sic zerbrauch Paul die Brille 'She
broke [sup.dat]Paul's glasses' is not the possessor of the
glasses, but the affectee in an event of breaking. This, however, does
not cover the whole range of native speakers' intuitions. The
typical intuitions are that Paul is (indirectly) affected, and that it
is Paul's glasses that are broken. Even if raising cannot be the
answer, we somehow have to model the interparticipant relation felt to
hold between the referent of the extra argument (Paul) and of that of
the more deeply embedded argument (the glasses).
I propose that the semantics of possession or, more generally, of
relationality of the more deeply embedded argument in extra argument
constructions should be modeled in terms of voice and some notion of
"binding." The extra argument "binds" the
unsaturated variable of the c-commanded relational noun within the DP
that denotes the possessum or (body) part of the referent of the extra
argument. (14) Implementing this idea in an explicit syntax-semantics
framework is not trivial, though. If we do not want to contend ourselves
with a purely syntactic notion of binding, we will have to say where
quantification enters the picture. Extra arguments may be, and typically
are, nonquantificational definite DPs, but semantic binding requires a
quantifier. In the next subsection, I will sketch the implementation
proposed for German "possessor datives" as laid out in Hole
(2005). The other subsections of Section 4 are devoted to a comparison
of the proposal advocated here with other proposals. We will then move
on to state the adjustments that are needed to cover the wider empirical
domain of this article (Section 5).
4.2. The implementation for German dative extra arguments (a.k.a.
"possessor datives")
The account proposed in Hole (2005) is couched in a neo-Davidsonian
event semantics in the spirit of Kratzer (1996, 2003). In Kratzer's
framework, only the internal argument(s) of a verb is (/are) required by
the valency of the verb. Agent arguments that surface as subjects of
transitive predications, for instance, are merged outside VP, they do
not correspond to an argument position pre-specified by the verb, and
their thematic role is likewise introduced independently of the verb; an
agentive voice head (Kratzer 1996) performs this task. A special rule of
composition, event identification, makes sure that the AGENT argument
introduced in the specifier of the voice phrase denotes a participant in
the event that is characterized by the VP, and not in some other event
(see below for more detailed discussion).
The voice phrase implementation for "possessor datives"
proceeds along similar lines. An affectee voice head right above VP
introduces an affectee argument into the structure (for the
characterization of the affectee role, see Section 2.1). By way of a
combination of an abstraction rule and variable identification--a more
general version of Kratzer's event identification--the identity of
the possessor referent of the more deeply embedded argument and of the
affectee referent is ensured alongside the identity of the two event
variables involved. The combined effect of predicate abstraction and
variable identification may be seen as a specific kind of binding.
We will use the bracketed consituent in (30) for illustration (the
same sample computation is presented in much greater detail in Hole
2005).
(30) Sie will [dem Jungen [vp den Kopf streicheln]].
she wants the.DAT boy the head stroke
'She wants to stroke the boy's head.'
lit. 'She wants to stroke [sup.dat]the boy [sup.acc]the
head.'
One possible interpretation of the VP is given in (31). The
'g(5)'-part of the denotation will be explained in a moment.
(31) [[den Kopf streicheln]] = [lambda]e.stroke g(5)'s head(e)
In accordance with Kratzer's theory, the denotation of the VP
in (31) has no unsaturated argument position except for the one of the
event argument. With existential binding the denotation in (31) may be
paraphrased as 'There is an event of stroking the boy's
head', provided the assignment function g maps the index 5 to the
boy. Note that, quite standardly, Kopf 'head' in (31) is
analyzed as a relational noun which brings along an argument slot for a
possessor even in the absence of an overt possessor DP. An implicit
argument with the index 5 fills this argument slot in our example, and
the argument with this index is mapped to the boy, but other index
numbers would also be good possibilities as long as they are mapped to
individuals which are in the universe of discourse and have a head. The
VP then merges with the affectee head. The function of this head is
spelled out in (32).
(32) Function of [Aff.sup.0]:
a. Denotation: [[[Aff.sup.0]]] = [lambda]x[lambda]e.x is an
affectee in e
b. Abstraction:
[MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
c. Variable identification: f([Aff.sup.0] g(VP) [??] h(Aff')
<e,<s,t>> (15) <e,<s,t>> <e,<s,t>>
The denotation of [Aff.sup.0] in (32a) states that an affectee as
characterized in Section 2.1 is involved in the event as a
sentient/conscious and causally affected participant. This argument slot
will be filled by the dative argument, which enters the computation in
SpecAffP. But before this happens, the abstraction rule (32b) applies.
What it does is turn the VP denotation, which only had one unsaturated
argument position for the event argument, into a denotation with another
unsaturated argument position in the position where the argument with
the index n is located. Let's say n is 5 (recall that the boy bears
the index 5 in our example). (33) states the denotation of the VP before
predicate abstraction (the assignment function maps the index 5 to the
boy), and (34) provides the denotation after predicate abstraction (the
slot of the possessor of the head is "reopened" by modifying
the assignment function: whatever bears the index 5 is mapped to x). The
outcome of combining the VP denotation of (34) with [Aff.sup.0] (cf.
[32a]) is (35).
(33) [[den Kopf streicheln]] = [lambda]e.stroke g(5)'s head(e)
(34) [[den Kopf streicheln]][5[right arrow]x] =
[lambda]x[lambda]e.stroke x's head(e)
(35) [[[Aff.sup.0] den Kopf streicheln]][5[right arrow]x] =
[lambda]x[lambda]e.stroke x's head(e) & affectee(x)(e)
(35) with existential closure of the open argument slots will then
be something like 'There is an event e and an individual x such
that x's head is stroked in e and x is an affectee in e'. If
then the argument dem Jungen 'the.DAT boy' is merged in the
next step, we get the truth conditions: 'There is an event e in
which the boy's head is stroked and the boy is an affectee in
e', again with existential closure of the event variable. For these
truth conditions to come about, (32c), which I haven't discussed
yet, is indispensable. What it does in short is to ensure that the
affectee referent is identical to the possessor referent of the head,
and that the event in which x is an affectee is the same event in which
x's head is stroked. It does so by mere stipulation. Worse still,
it does so by means of a special kind of composition rule, namely,
variable identification. This rule states that if two constituents whose
denotations each have an unsaturated position for (i) an individual and
(ii) an eventuality are to combine, then the resulting denotation will
identify the two variables of the same ontological type. In other words,
the resulting function will not have four unsaturated argument
slots--two for individuals and two for events--but only two: one for an
individual, and one for an event. The move of introducing such a rule of
composition into the system may seem absurd at first, because it is a
theoretically costly implementation of something highly basic. I still
think that it is fully warranted within the general framework adopted
here. Let us recall the general idea of neoDavidsonian event
decomposition which underlies my whole proposal. If we find it
attractive to model (i) verb denotations as predicates of events and
(ii) argument structure (and adverbial adjunctions) as the conjunction
of separate predicates which typically take just one argument apart from
the event argument (cf. Kratzer 1996, 2003) and which all contribute to
the overall specification of the eventuality at hand, then we need a
mechanism which explicitly states that the conjoined predicates of
events all specify one and the same event. Even if we may not need such
a special mechanism of unification at other levels of description (in
psychology, for instance, the counterpart of event identification might
be derivative of something else), we do need it in formal semantics because there is no well-formedness condition in the formalism which
only allows for conjoined predicates if they specify the same event.
Kratzer (1996: 122), who has introduced event identification into the
framework, says nothing about the balance of necessity and costs of this
rule of composition, she just states it as in (36), and she needs it to
tie the AGENT argument to the event denoted by the VP function, whose
denotation is represented as g in (36).</p> <pre> (36)
Event identification (Kratzer 1996: 122) f
g [??] h
<e,<s,t>>
<s,t> <e,<s,t>>
(denotation and
(denotation (event (denotation semantic type of
and identification) and the agentive voice
semantic
semantic head [Voice.sup.0]) type of VP)
type
of voice') </pre> <p>This rule is
different from variable identification in (32c), which is repeated in
(37) for convenience.</p>
<pre> (37) Variable identification (Hole 2005) f
g [??] h <e,<s,t>>
<e,<s,t>>
<e,<s,t>> (denotation and
(denotation and (variable (denotation semantic type
semantic type
identification) and of the affectee of VP after
semantic head [Aff.sup.0]) predicate
type of Aff') abstraction)
</pre> <p>Event identification takes a two-place function
and a one-place function as input and delivers a two-place function.
Variable identification takes two two-place functions as input and
delivers a two-place function as output. In a sense, variable
identification is simpler than event identification, because both
variables of f undergo a parallel identification process in the case of
variable identification, but not in the case of event identification.
From a less formal viewpoint, we may perhaps say that the further
integration of arguments into the specification of an event is simpler
to the extent that the additional argument has as much as possible
"to do" with the VP denotation. In our realm, "having
something to do" is nothing but the fact that the affectee referent
plays a role already in the denotation of VP. In the example sentence
(32) (Sic will dem Jungen den Kopf streicheln 'She wants to stroke
[sup.dat][the boy]'s head') the affectee is also the possessor
of the head. Other double involvements are conceivable, and in Hole
(2005) I argue that so-called beneficiary datives should really be
analyzed as affectees which "bind" a variable in a purposive constituent inside VP (with "binding" again taken in the sense
of the combined effect of an abstraction rule as in [32b] and variable
identification as in [32c]/[37]).
In Section 5 we will check how much mileage we can get out of this
proposal and what modifications are necessary to cover all the examples
that we have surveyed in the empirical first half of the article. Before
doing this, I will devote Sections 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 to justifying why I
have chosen the modeling in (32) and why I think that other solutions
won't do.
4.3.1. Possessor raising. Possessor raising approaches to extra
argumentality as defined in this article have already been evaluated in
Section 2. The conclusion for both syntactic and lexical possessor
raising was that raising accounts must be discarded because of the facts
in (38) (the bits of text in parentheses state how the voice analysis
defended here evades each problem).
(38) i. Possessor raising cannot (easily) explain why the thematic
requirements of raised possessors differ from those of DP-internal
possessors.
(Here: The thematic requirements are different because the two
positions are not directly linked by movement or a lexical process.)
ii. Possessor raising cannot explain why raised alleged Possessors
behave like affectees with respect to the dative passive and similar
constructions.
(Here: They behave like affectees because they are affectees, and
nothing else.)
iii. Raised possessors would combine presuppositional information
about possession and entailed or asserted information about affectedness
in a single DP. (Here: The presuppositional information about possession
comes from the DP-internal (possibly implicit) possessor, and this
information is expected to be presuppositional. The entailed/asserted
information about affectedness is tied to the affectee argument.)
To these three arguments I would like to add a fourth one which
hasn't been given in Section 2 because I lack relevant evidence for
languages other than German. Still, since in my eyes it is a strong
argument, I do not want to leave it unmentioned. It rests on the
interpretive behavior of allegedly raised possessors in certain
constructions involving ellipsis. (39) is a pertinent example; the
elided constituent is crossed out.
(39) Du sollst [die Haare schneiden] wie ihm you should the hair
cut like him.DAT
[[begin strikethrough]die Haare scheiden[end strikethrough]]
the hair cut
'You should cut the hair the way you cut his.'
(lit. 'You should cut the hair like dathim.')
This is a natural sentence to say if a hair dresser instructs her
apprentice in the presence of two customers that are referred to without
being addressed (say, because the interlocutors stand behind the
customers). The hair referred to by the first object DP die Haare
'the hair' is definite because it is contextually given. The
utterance of ihm 'him.DAT' in the second half of the sentence
is probably accompanied by a pointing gesture. Now, if ihm were a raised
possessor, there should be a trace in the elided constituent. On the
assumption that elided constituents and the parallel pronounced ones are
identical in their structures, the first bracketed VP in (39) would have
to contain a trace as well. This cannot be the case, because there is no
argument in the first half of (39) which could bind the trace. If the
first VP doesn't contain a trace, then the elided one doesn't,
either. But this means that ihm cannot have moved out of the elided VP.
This argument is fatal for all theories defending possessor raising that
put an identity constraint on ellipsis and require traces to be
bound/governed by the moved item. (39) is also fatal for lexical
"possessor raising" as proposed by Wunderlich (1996, 2000).
Even if ihm 'him.DAT' in (39) is not moved in the syntax, but
is inserted into the syntactic structure because the specially derived
verb in the elided VP projects one more argument, the identity
constraint on ellipsis would still predict that the overt VP in (39)
should have the same argument structure. As witnessed by the first half
of the sentence, though, no dative argument is projected by the
pronounced VP. Therefore, the elided VP cannot project a dative argument
either.
Example (39) constitutes a really hard nut to crack for all the
competing theories that I am aware of in our domain. How does the
proposal defended here escape this problem? The important thing to note
is that the two VPs as such are fully identical. Only when [Aff.sup.0]
right above VP is merged in the second half of the sentence does
predicate abstraction apply, and the possessor slot of Haare
'hairs' in the elided VP is reopened by modifying the
assignment function. Up to this point (as perceived in a bottom-up
perspective), the denotation of the elided VP and the pronounced VP are
fully identical. Specifically, the index of the (doubly) implicit
possessor of the hair in the second half may, up to the VP level, be
identical to the index of the possessor of the hair in the first half.
The abstraction rule (cf. [32b]) annuls this index.
4.3.2. Vergnaud and Zubizarreta (1992). Except for two small hints
in Section 2 and Note 14, I have so far remained silent about the
relationship between the present proposal and its most similar
predecessor, Vergnaud and Zubizarreta's (1992) (henceforth,
V&Z) analysis of their inalienable constructions in French and
English as in Le medecin leur a radiographie l'estomae (lit.)
'The doctor x-rayed them the stomach'. V&Z's
treatment stands in the tradition of Kayne (1975) and Gurron (1985) and
is conceptually related to Borer and Grodzinsky's (1986) in that
(some kind of) binding is identified as the relevant dependency relation holding between indirect objects and (implicit) possessors of the
pertinent structures. Although at first blush this general line of
argumentation is similar to mine and the approach developed here might
seem to be just a more specific implementation of V&Z's, the
exact relationship between the two proposals is surprisingly difficult
to assess. This is so for the following reasons. First, and quite
generally, V&Z present a government and binding implementation, and
it is not evident what their analysis would look like in Minimalist
terms. Second, V&Z do not give an explicit account of the semantics
that they assume, and no denotations of syntactic nodes are given at
all, except for the (rather unusual) denotations of inalienably possessed nominal predicates like 'throat' as gorge(x), as
opposed to the alienable counterpart gorge (V&Z 1992: 597). (16)
Third, V&Z make recourse to a type/token ambiguity between definite
DPs that is crucial for their analysis and which arises because of what
they identify as two homophonous variants of the definite article in
French. I do not assume such an ambiguity to have a crucial status in
the explanation of the facts that I am discussing and, what is more, I
cannot make much sense of it because it is unclear to me what the result
is when a verbal denotation combines with an object denotation that
denotes a type (i.e. a French doctor doesn't examine a type when he
examines somebody's throat, but V&Z must be read so as to
propose precisely this). (17)
4.4. Summary on extra arguments denoting affectees (and
experiencers)
Let us start the summary of this larger section on interparticipant
relations by recapitulating the gist of the voice analysis for so-called
"possessor datives." We may say that it is just an illusion if
we classify extra arguments as affectees and possessors at the same
time. Affectedness comes into play in the functional voice phrase where
the affectee argument is first merged. Predicate abstraction and
variable identification (cf. [32]) make sure that the referent denoted
by the affectee argument is identical to the referent of a possessor
inside a more deeply embedded argument. The relationship between the
affectee argument and the more deeply embedded possessor must, by virtue
of the involved tree geometry and the involved compositional procedures,
be a c-command relation. This allows us to speak of a kind of binding
relationship between the affectee argument and the possessor argument.
Affecteehood was defined as sentience/consciousness (proto-agent
property) plus causal affectedness (proto-patient property) above, and
the same ingredients seem also sufficient for experiencers. Experiencers
are simply affectees in eventualities without any other participants
that are more prototypically agentive. This reduction of experiencerhood
to 'affecteehood plus highest degree of agentivity in an
eventuality' significantly broadens the coverage of the voice
proposal made in this section. (18) For the cases which cannot be
handled yet, turn to the following section.
5. Extra argument structures that necessitate amendments
5.1. The problem with inanimate and nonagentive extra arguments
Inanimate extra arguments as in (40) (= [lb]/[12a]) and animate
arguments which are not consciously or sentiently involved in an
eventuality as in reading B of (41) pose a challenge for the account
defended in Section 4.
(40) The ship tore one of its sails.
(41) Dem Sanger ist die Jacke zu eng.
the.DAT singer is the jacket too tight
reading A: 'The singer finds that his jacket is too
tight.'
reading B: '(It is objectively the case, or someone other than
the
singer finds that) the singer's jacket is too tight.'
The problem centers around the thematic role of extra arguments
like the ship in (40), or dem Sanger 'the.DAT singer' in (41).
In (40) the ship can't be an affectee as defined in this article,
because ships are neither sentient nor conscious, that is, they
don't have the proto-agent properties criterial for affectees, and
there is no requirement whatsoever for (40) to be understood in a
metaphorical sense such that the ship would have to stand for an animate
being. In (41), similarly, the singer is animate, but reading B
completely abstracts away from this fact. The only repercussion of the
ontological animacy of the singer (as opposed to his nonagentive
involvement in the reported state of affairs) is its encoding as a
dative (as opposed to a PP, which would be required for an inanimate
referent; such PP extra arguments have been neglected in this article
for the practical reason of restricting the factors to be controlled;
cf. the beginning of Section 3). I will return to an example like (41)
below and concentrate on (40) for the moment. From among Dowty's
(1991: 572) proto-agent properties, the ship in (40) only qualifies as
"exist[ing] independently of the event named by the verb," and
Dowty includes this property in the list of role entailments only
tentatively. (19) This hesitation is the starting point for the
argumentation to follow. Primus (2004: 2) adds "possession of
another entity" to the list of proto-agent entailments, and one may
argue that, in some sense of the word, the ship in (40) possesses its
sail. It is, however, unclear whether the addition of possessorhood to
the list of proto-agent entailments is really necessary in the light of
the idea which was first introduced into general linguistics from
Indo-European studies by Benveniste (1966) and which is becoming
increasingly popular (cf. among many others Den Dikken 1997 or Meinunger
forthcoming), namely, that possession boils down to (the control of)
co-occurrence (in space) of the possessed item with another entity. Put
differently, Dowty's tentative property of independent existence
would, together with his corresponding proto-patient entailment of
"dependen[cy] on another participant [...]," allow for the
formulation of possession in these related terms of independence and
dependence. But what is the gain if Dowty's tentative properties of
independence of, or dependence on, other participants in a situation are
included in the definition of proto-agents and protopatients? The answer
is that recalcitrant stative eventualities as described by A house has
walls and a roof may be viewed as instantiating the
protoagent/proto-patient scheme. If only this move wouldn't put
such a strain on our intuitions! In my eyes, a house as a whole which
has walls and a roof simply isn't agentive at all, no matter how
much we stretch the notion of agentivity. No other of Dowty's
proto-agentive entailments is detached from common sense intuitions in a
comparable way. The reason why he includes independent existence into
his list is that this move allows him to do away with the figure/ground
distinction in the theory of thematic roles. The following digression on
locative predications and gestalt properties critically reviews the
filtering out of gestalt roles as possible thematic roles. Readers who
have no problem with the assumption of a ground (or landmark) role at
least for some predications may skip the following subsection. The
mainstream in linguistics seems to favor the idea that gestalt roles
have no place in a theory of thematic roles, and therefore the
digression appears to be justified and necessary.
5.2. Digression on gestalt roles
The idea that gestalt features of eventualities might qualify for
inclusion into the set of thematic roles pops up again and again in the
literature, most notably perhaps in Gruber's (1965) and
Talmy's (1985, 2000: 339-341) work. The typical reaction to such
considerations is that, while considered attractive at first, the
assumption of thematic roles like figure or ground is judged
superfluous, and that gestalt is relevant at a level of language
description different from the theory of thematic roles (cf., e.g.,
Dowty 1991:563-564 or Dfirscheid 1999: 254). Dowty's arguments in
this domain are endorsed by other researchers, and one gets the
impression that Dowry has once and for all times discredited the idea of
gestalt notions as thematic roles (but cf. Talmy 2000:339-341 or
Maienborn 2001: 192). I would like to take a fresh look at the issue,
and the result will be that Dowty's argument is not valid and that
we indeed need something like the ground role (termed
"landmark" below), at least for stative locative predications,
and possibly for all locative predications.
By "locative predication" I refer to predications
describing configurations in space that conform to the criteria in (42).
(42) Criteria for locative predications:
a. The predication asserts or entails a specific spatial
configuration between at least two entities in space.
b. The position in space of one entity is identified relative to
the other entity.
c. The predication may only be assigned a truth value if the
position of the entity with respect to which the other entity is
situated in space is identifiable (i.e. the position of this entity must
be presupposed).
Apart from the differences between conflation patterns for the
different notional components of locative predications that are
identified in Talmy's (1985) seminal paper, Talmy also posits a
major cross-cutting dividing line between stative locative predications
and others that involve movement of the referent-to-be-situated.
'[BE.sub.L]' is Talmy's term for stationary existence in
space, which stands on a par with the pure 'MOVE' component of
locative predications involving movement. Locative predications
involving movement may further be subdivided into those where the moving
entity has agentive control over its movement, and others where it does
not. The same split holds mutatis mutandis for BEL predications such
that the enduring existence of the stationary spatial configuration may
require agentive control or not (cf., e.g., the control ambiguity of
verbs like stand if used with animates as opposed to inanimates: Paul
couldn't stand any longer and fell to the ground vs. ??? The statue
couldn't stand any longer and fell to the ground). In order to keep
the present argument manageable I will disregard those locative
predications that involve movement. We will, for the time being, only
look at stative locative predications which may or may not involve the
sentient/conscious involvement of the ground referent.
Dowty's argument for rejecting a ground role for the locative
which denotes the place with respect to which something is located by a
locative predication rests on the identification of the figure/ground
distinction with the given/new distinction relevant for information
structure. He observes that, depending on the discourse in which it is
used, the lamp in The lamp is over the table may preferably be given,
but that it may also be new or focal information in an appropriate
discourse environment. A thematic role, however, should be constant
across different discourse embeddings of a single sentence. The problem
with this argument is the identification of locative gestalt features
and information-structural properties and gestalt. While it is possible
and fruitful to talk about new information in a discourse in terms of
the figure notion, this is an application of the gestalt concept which
is independent of the gestalt properties of locative eventualities as
such. The information status of a referent within a spatial
configuration may change with the embedding discourse, but in a sentence
like The apple is on the table the locative gestalt properties are
fixed; the apple is the (locative) figure and the (surface of the) table
is the (locative) ground. (To appreciate this fact, one must keep in
mind that for a DP to bear a focus accent and be [part of] focal
information does not mean 'denoting a referent whose position in
space has so far not been in the discourse background'.) A sentence
like The lamp is over the table instantiates the same fixed
figure/ground scheme, even though at first it may seem that the lamp and
the table might compete for the figure status because they are more
easily comparable in general saliency and size. The important thing is
that the locational figure/ground distinction that we are dealing with
here is built into the prepositions that are used in such sentences in
English, and therefore they do not change across contexts (the
complement of a locative preposition always denotes a ground). If this
is true, then the figure/ground mappings that we are interested in are
stable across different contexts.
With this in mind, let us look at the extra argument sentence in
(43).
(43) Dem Stinger istdie Jacke am Bauch zu eng. the.DAT singer is
the jacket at.the belly too tight
Reading A: 'The singer finds that his jacket is too tight
around his waist.'
Reading B: '(It is objectively the case, or someone other than
the singer finds that) the singer's jacket is too tight around his
waist.'
The ambiguity of (43), which is reflected by the two translations,
is well-entrenched and is easily elicited with speakers of German. (20)
If the arguments given in this article to assign the affectee role to
the dative argument in the A-reading of such sentences are correct, then
we must ask ourselves what role the dative argument bears in reading B
where the dative referent is not entailed to perceive anything. Note
that we have seen arguments above that the dative argument is not a
possessor. The possessor of the belly is implicit in the PP am Bauch
'on the/his belly'. The spatial relation denoted by am holds
between the jacket and the singer's belly. The dative DP just
serves to tie this configuration to a referent that may serve as a
ground for this configuration. It is important to see that the figure
role of the jacket in the spatial am-configuration does not correspond
to a pronounced constituent. This gets clearer if we replace the PP am
Bauch with a relative clause as in (43'), and this time only the B
reading is provided.
(43') Dem Stinger istdie Jacke da, wo sie am Bauch
the.DAX singer is the jacket there where it at.the belly
ist, zu eng.
is too tight
Reading B: '(It is objectively the case, or someone other than
the singer finds that) the singer's jacket is too tight where it
goes around his waist.'
If we want to say that reading B of (43') has the same truth
conditions as reading B of (43)--and this seems desirable--then the
simplest assumption is that the subject argument of the relative clause
of (43') and, more importantly, its role is implicit in (43). We
thus have a recursive figure/ ground mapping. The jacket (figure) is in
the region of the belly (ground), and this spatial configuration as a
whole constitutes the figure whose ground is the singer. Thus, the
dative can plausibly be argued to denote a ground in a figure/ground
configuration, and no obvious alternatives for a thematic role
assignment present themselves.
Another straightforward argument against the discrediting of
gestalt roles relies on Mandarin ba-sentences like (44) (= [21c]; recall
that ba allows for the integration of additional preverbal extra
arguments under special conditions).
(44) Ta ba bilu sheng-le huo.
(s)he BA fireplace ignite-PRF fire
'(S)he put on a fire in the fireplace.'
Judging from the English translation alone, one might want to say
that the ba-marked argument is just an internal locative in the sense of
Maienborn (2001). This idea receives initial support from the
substitutability of ba as witnessed by (45).
(45) Ta zai bilu sheng-le huo.
(s)heat fireplace ignite-PRV fire
'(S)he put on a fire in the fireplace.'
In (45) a preposition is used instead of ba, and the translation
does not change. That this cannot be the whole story becomes evident in
(46).
(46) Ta zai/*ba shulin sheng-le huo.
(s)heat/BA woods ignite-PRY fire
'(S)he put on a fire in the woods.'
(46) is ungrammatical with ba, and the reason for this is that a
fire is not an essential part of any forest, while a fire forms part of
the functional whole of a fireplace. We may say that ba may only be used
to introduce an extra argument into a clause if (i) there is a
figure/ground relation between the referent of the extra argument and
the referent of the more deeply embedded argument, and if (ii) this
figure/ground relation is conventional, that is, mediated by
inalienability or purposivity. Put differently, the relevant
figure/ground relation must in some sense be essential, and not just
accidental. Pure contiguity in space alone cannot be the sufficient
condition for the use of ba, because otherwise (46) should be fine with
ba.
Summing up, I claim that one may meaningfully speak of thematic
roles that correspond to the ground and the figure of the gestalt
notion. In a stative locative state of affairs in which none of the
participants is entailed to be sentient or conscious, the ground
property of anchoring another referent in space remains as the only
function of extra arguments as in (43) or (43'). As said above, it
would amount to overstretching the notion of agentivity if one subsumed
the ground notion under the agent notion, and therefore, I side with
Dowty insofar as I assign "independent existence" a dubious
status in the list of proto-agent entailments. Since Dowty wants to
reduce all roles to the agent/patient contrast, he has no choice but to
include the ground property par excellence, independent existence, among
the proto-agent entailments. I would argue that the perspective should
be changed. Two fundamentally different kinds of predications should be
distinguished. On the one side we have predications that may be subsumed
under the heading "eventualities with a cause that forms part of
the linguistic conceptualization." This is the realm of the
proto-agent/proto-patient contrast. On the other side we have purely
stative locative predications which denote "figure/ground
configurations in space whose coming into being or change is not part of
the linguistic conceptualization." These two kinds of predication
types form extremes in that a given complex predication need not belong
to one kind to the complete exclusion of the other. For instance,
predications denoting agentively caused directed motion form a mixed
type. There are other eventualities in the course of which spatial
configurations come into being, are changed, or cease to exist, but
which have no known or linguistically conceptualized cause. Such
eventualities are encoded by unaccusative predicates (cf. Abraham 2004).
Whether they instantiate a mixed type between purely locative
predications and purely causal predications depends on whether motion is
necessarily seen as an instance of the proto-agent/proto-patient scheme,
or whether motion may also be seen as a pure instantiation of the
locative predication scheme. I will leave the matter unsettled here, but
assume that if a sentence like The ship tore one of its sails is, as a
whole, classified as denoting an eventuality with a cause, it will at
least also denote or entail a subeventuality which is fully locational,
in this case relating to the resulting state of there being one
(functional) sail less on the mast of the ship (cf. Section 5.3).
For a last refinement, and to make the parallel between affectees
and grounds as discussed here more visible, we should note that our
grounds are all figures if we move up one level. At the level of the
complete situations that are denoted by our extra argumental sentences,
the ground referents that we are talking about never define the whole
scene. They are always locata which, secondarily, become localizers.
Take the example sentence The tree grew leaves. At the highest level of
figure/ground mappings, the tree is a figure before a (possibly highly
unspecific) ground. But with respect to the leaves and the growing
event, the tree constitutes the ground. Analogous reasonings can be
developed for all other ground arguments that we have encountered. And
this is not a surprise if we take the mixed nature of affectees and the
parallelism between affectees and intermediate grounds seriously.
Affectees combine proto-agent properties and proto-patient properties,
and our extra argumental grounds combine proto-ground properties and
figure properties.
For this reason, I think that "ground" is not the best
term to characterize the involvement of extra argumental (intermediate)
ground arguments. Moreover, this terminology invites the
misunderstanding that Dowty falls victim of when he confounds
figure/ground configurations in space with those in information
structure. I will therefore make use of Langacker's (1987: 217)
well-established term "landmark" (for "intermediate
ground") to refer to the locative gestalt role of some extra
arguments (cf. Maienborn 2001, who also uses this term in a generative
context). The corresponding term "trajectory" (for
"figure") is not needed because we can use the more
established term "theme" instead, if needed.
5.3. Landmark voice
Section 4.2 was devoted to the implementation of affectee extra
arguments with the help of the voice head [Aff.sup.0]. The denotation of
this voice head is given again in (47), and the corresponding denotation
for the voice head for landmark arguments of purely stative
eventualities is added in (48a). (48b) rephrases (48a), and it makes use
of the specification of the landmark notion given in parentheses in
(48a), but it abstracts away from the presuppositionality of the
landmark position.
(47) [[[Aff.sup.0]]] = [lambda]x[lambda]e.x is an affectee in e
(48) a. [[[Ldm.sup.0]]] = [lambda]x[lambda]s.x is the landmark for
s (with a landmark referent being the ground with its presupposed
location in space vis-a-vis which the location of the theme or figure
referent of s may be identified)
b. [[[Ldm.sup.0]]] = [lambda]x[lambda]s.s holds in a region of x
The variable s in (48) ranges over states (as opposed to events;
cf. Note 15) since the prototypical field of application of landmark
arguments is in stative locative predications. For the reasons given in
the last subsection, I will leave the matter undecided whether dynamic
eventualities involving motion may also integrate landmark arguments, or
whether the protoagent/proto-patient scheme may be put to use here. Note
that those sentences from the empirical survey of Section 3 that require
the assumption of landmark arguments are all dynamic eventualities, but
that they all denote or entail stative sub-events whose truth conditions
may be spelled out with the help of the landmark role. The sentence in
(49a) (= [1b]) may, for instance, be said to entail (49b) as a resulting
state.
(49) a. The ship tore one of its sails.
b. 'One of the ship's sails does not exist as a
functional entity on the ship (anymore).'
Now, what is the difference between (49a) and (50a)?
(50) a. One of the ship's sails tore.
b. 'One of the ship's sails does not exist as a
functional entity (anymore).'
The difference can be read off the paraphrases in (49b) and (50b).
They each spell out the resultant state which holds after the sail tore,
but the one spelling out the resultant state of the sentence with the
landmark voice head, (49b), puts a contiguity constraint on (49a) which
is irrelevant for the interpretation of (50a). (50a) may be true in a
context in which the sail tore while it was not in the same place as the
ship or, more accurately, while it was not in its functional position on
the mast of the ship. (49a) is false in such a situation. With locative
predications, the fact of a state holding in a region of a landmark
referent is thus the counterpart of the conscious or sentient
involvement of an affectee referent into an eventuality which
instantiates the proto-agent/proto-patient scheme. A German example
which illustrates this analogous contrast again is provided in (51) (cf.
[4b]).
(51) Dann starb (ihm) auch seine Mutter.
then died him.DAT also his mother
'Then his mother died (on him), too.'
(51) with the extra argument is only good if the dative referent is
still alive, while the use of the possessive pronoun inside the more
deeply embedded DP requires no such thing. (21)
It would require some more work to develop the fully compositional
semantics for locative eventualities with Landmark arguments, especially
with respect to the parallel implementation of predicate abstraction and
event identification as proposed for the affectee head. At the present
level of explicitness, the idea that landmark arguments "bind"
a variable in their sister constituents the way affectee arguments
"bind" variables in their VPs is only evinced by the bound use
of possessive pronouns in sentences like (49a) and by the double
occurrence of the ship in the partial spell-out of truth conditions as
in (49b). Some more suggestive examples follow in Sections 5.4 and 5.5,
but we will basically remain in the sphere of impressionistic arguments.
From among the two points which conclude this subsection, I consider (i)
sufficiently well-grounded to count as a result of Sections 5.1 through
5.3; (ii) must be substantiated in more detail:
(i) We need the landmark as a thematic role;
(ii) Landmarks and affectees are treated on a par with respect to
extra argumentality, the dividing line between their fields of
application being whether a locational eventuality or a caused
eventuality is described.
5.4. Landmarks as extra arguments must be functional or organic
wholes
The contrast exemplified by (52) has not been taken care of yet.
(52) a. The ship tore one of its sails.
b. * The mast tore one of its sails.
Masts are, just like sails, parts of larger functional wholes,
namely ships. Judging from (52), extra argumental landmarks must be
functional wholes. In other words, extra argumental landmarks must
contain, or be anaphoric to a DP with, an absolute noun, as opposed to a
relational noun. This statement must immediately be refined in the light
of the data in (53) and (54).
(53) a. The tree grew leaves (on its branches).
b. * The branch grew leaves (on it).
(54) The branch in the vase grew leaves (on it).
The deviance of (53b) vanishes as soon as the branch is construed
as a functional or organic whole. A branch in a vase is like a whole
plant, and therefore it may be used as an extra argumental landmark in
(54). The ungrammaticality of (53b) is thus restricted to transitive or
relational uses of the noun branch, but it is not tied to the lexeme branch as such. The same holds for the contrast in (55) which goes away
if the fender in (55b) is interpreted as a radio set that is shaped like
a fender (or actually is a fender which is used as a radio body).
(55) a. The car bent its antenna.
b. (*) The fender bent its antenna.
Still, there remains a certain amount of data that I cannot make
full sense of. While speakers of English have no problems with (55b) if
the fight context is provided, (52b) continues to be judged deviant even
if the mast is contextualized as a decorational mast which comes without
a ship and therefore represents a complete functional whole.
The matter will be left unsettled, but this does not undermine the
generalization which heads this subsection: landmarks as extra arguments
must be functional or organic wholes. This generalization constitutes a
necessary condition for the use of landmark extra arguments, but it is
evidently not a sufficient condition.
5.5. Explicit and implicit landmark regions
The examples in (53) and (54) were good with or without the
explicit mention of the spatial region of the (part of the) landmark
referent where the resulting state holds (The tree grew leaves [on its
branches]). I have argued above that those regions must be semantically
active even if they are not pronounced. The lexical means to link the
spatial region of the leaves to the branches (and to the tree as a
whole) was the general English preposition of contiguity for such cases,
viz. on. Given other conflation patterns of locative predications, other
lexical choices become possible. Three pertinent examples from Mandarin
are given in (56) (= [20a], [20b], [21a]).
(56) a. Ta ba juzi bo-le pi.
(s)he BA orange peel-PRF peel
'(S)he removed the peel of the orange.'
b. Tamen ba zhu fang-le xue.
they BA pig release-PRF blood
'They drained the pig of its blood.'
c. Zhangsan ba men shang-le suo.
Zhangsan BA door put.on-PRF lock
'Zhangsan put a lock on the door.'
In all of these examples, the information about the regions of the
landmarks where the theme or patient referents (the peel, the blood, the
lock) are located when the resulting state holds is encoded as part of
the verbs' meanings. The verbs bo 'peel' and fang
'release' entail that the themes end up AWAY FROM or DETACHED
FROM the landmarks (the orange, the pig). The verb shang in its basic
meaning carries a superessive meaning 'on top of'. In (56c) it
is used to express the general contiguity-plus-contact relation that was
expressed by on in (53) and (54). The conflation pattern underlying (57)
(= [21c]) is more opaque.
(57) Ta ba qiang ti-le yi-ge dong.
(s)he BA wall kick-Pro: 1-CL hole
'(S)he kicked a hole into the wall.'
On the one hand, one may argue that the hole is "added"
to the wall and that a state is the result in which the wall has a hole
in it. On the other hand, the resulting hole in the wall may be regarded
as destroying the functionality of the wall, just like the tearing of a
sail destroys the functionality of the sail and of the corresponding
ship. Perhaps both views can be integrated into a single set of truth
conditions for this sentence, but given the ungrammaticality of
sentences like (46) with ba further specifications will be necessary. We
said above in the context of (44)-(46) that ba may only add extra
arguments to a predication if the more deeply embedded theme argument
refers to a functional or essential part of the extra argumental
landmark referent. Yet, a hole that's been kicked into a wall is
certainly not an essential or functional part of the wall. I lack
evidence to make full sense of the conflation pattern instantiated in
(57) and will leave its discussion for another occasion.
5.6. Summary on landmarks and their relation to affectees
Summing up the discussion on the voice head analysis that I propose
for extra argumental landmarks, one may say that landmarks are, in a
sense, like affectees. A landmark is there to denote the referent which
allows one to identify the place where the VP eventuality, or a substate
thereof, holds. An affectee is there to denote the referent which may be
sentiently/consciously affected by the causal potential of the VP event.
Both affectees and landmarks are, therefore, points of reference--mental
ones in the case of affectees, locative ones in the case of landmarks.
6. Conclusions and outlook
In this article, I have investigated the empirical range of extra
arguments, that is, of surprising syntactic core arguments, in German,
English, and Mandarin. One important result concerns the fact that extra
arguments occur in all syntactic core functions. An extra argument may,
however, not be the most deeply embedded argument in a predication. This
restriction was modelled with the help of the voice analysis that I
proposed for extra argumentality. The voice heads that integrate extra
arguments into the structure come with an identity requirement. The
referent denoted by the extra argument must, in a different role,
already be part of the denotation of the sister node of the voice head.
Extra argumentality comes in two major kinds. The extra argument
may either be an affectee or a landmark.
The affectee referents studied here fulfilled the identity
requirement by simultaneously being possessor referents in the VP
eventualities. The modeling of this double role strives to account for
the longstanding intuition of "affected possessor" arguments
that other theories model as a possessor argument that has been moved to
the extra argumental position, or by stipulating a possessor in the
argument structure of (derived) verbs. I have tried to show that my
voice analysis is superior to such attempts. Hole (2005) extends the
analysis of affectee referents that are possessors at the same time to
so-called beneficiaries. In that study, being a beneficiary is
decomposed into affecteehood plus purposivity. If someone bakes me a
cake, I will be an affectee in this event, and the cake will have a
purpose for me (to feed me, to make me happy, or whatever may have been
the intention on the part of the agent referent).
The integration of landmark arguments is the other big field of
application for extra arguments. If the sister node of the extra
argumental voice head denotes a state involving a spatial configuration
(as a sub-event), the extra argument serves to denote the spatial ground
where the figure of the spatial configuration holds.
I have argued against attempts to characterize the landmark notion
in terms of the agent/patent contrast, even though this is probably the
favorite choice among researchers. I claim instead that there is a major
conceptual and linguistic split between eventualities that are
structured according to the (locational) figure/ground scheme, and
according to the (causal) agent/patient scheme.
An obvious blind spot of the proposal as defended here concerns the
lexical or categorial status of the variable that gets identified in the
more deeply embedded argument (as, for instance, in She stared me in the
x--eyes, i.e., in the eyes of the speaker). Here and in Hole (2005), I
have nothing to say about this problem. Still, arguments supporting the
existence and linguistic activity of this variable are delivered in Hole
(2005), and locality constraints for extra argumental variable
identification are stated. We may, therefore, be confident that the
variable in the more deeply embedded argument is not just a chimera.
Received 20 January 2004 Revised version received 31 March 2005
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich
References
Abraham, Werner (2004). VP-internal subjects as
"unaccusatives": Burzio's "object account" vs.
the "perfectivity account". In The Composition of
Meaning--From Lexeme to Discourse, Alice ter Meulen and Werner Abraham
(eds.), 83-111. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Aissen, Judith (1987). Tzotzil Clause Structure. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Benveniste, Emile (1966). Problemes de linguistique generale I.
Paris: Gallimard.
Borer, Hagit; and Grodzinsky, Yosef (1986). Syntactic cliticization
and lexical cliticization: the case of Hebrew dative critics. In Syntax
and Semantics. Vol. 19, Hagit Borer (ed.), 175-217. New York: Academic
Press.
Bossong, Georg (1998). Le marquage de l'experient dans les
langues d'Europe. In Actance et Valence dans les Langues de
l'Europe, Jack Feuillet (ed.), 769-788. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bresnan, Joan (1983). The passive in lexical theory. In The Mental
Representation of Grammatical Relations, Joan Bresnan (ed.), 3-86.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Buring, Daniel (forthcoming). Focus projection and default
prominence. In The Architecture of Focus. Studies in Generative Grammar,
Valeria Molnar and Susanne Winkler (eds.). Berlin and New York: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Cheung, Hung-Nin Samuel (1973). A comparative study in Chinese
grammars: the ba-construction. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1(3),
343-382.
Den Dikken, Marcel (1997). The syntax of possession and the verb
'have'. Lingua 101, 151-183.
Dowty, David (1991). Thematic proto-roles and argument selection.
Language 67(3), 547-619.
Durscheid, Christa (1999). Die verbalen Kasus des Deutschen.
Untersuchungen zur Syntax, Semantik und Perspektive. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Faarlund, Jan-Terje (1999). The notion of oblique subject and its
status in the history of Icelandic. Working Papers in Scandinavian
Syntax 63, 1-44.
Fox, Barbara (1981). Body part syntax. Studies in Language 5(3),
323-342.
Gallmann, Peter (1992). Dativanhebung? Groninger Arbeiten zur
Germanistischen Linguistik 5, 92-122.
Gruber, Jeffrey S. (1965). Studies in Lexical Relations.
Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Gueron, Jacqueline (1985). Inalienable possession, PRO-inclusion
and lexical chains. In Grammatical Representation, Jacqueline Gueron,
Hans-Georg Obenauer, and Jean-Yves Pollock (eds.), 43-86. Dordrecht:
Foris.
Hohle, Tilman (1982). Explikation fur "normale Betonung"
und "normale Wortstellung". In Satzglieder im Deutschen.
Vorschliige zu ihrer syntaktischen, semantischen und pragmatischen
Fundierung, Werner Abraham (ed.), 75-153. Tubingen: Narr.
Hole, Daniel (2002). Spell-bound? Accounting for unpredictable
self-forms in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Stories. Zeitschrift fur
Anglistik und Amerikanistik 50(3), 285-300.
--(2004). Extra argumentarity--a binding account of "possessor
raising" in German, English and Mandarin. Possessives and Beyond:
Semantics and Syntax, Ji-Yung Kim, Barbara H. Partee, and Yury A. Lander
(eds.), 365-383. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.
--(2005). Reconciling "possessor" datives and
"beneficiary" datives--towards a unified voice account of
dative binding in German. In Event Arguments in Syntax, Semantics and
Discourse, Claudia Maienborn and Angelika Wollstein (eds.), 213-242.
Tubingen: Niemeyer.
Hopper, Paul; and Thompson, Sandra A. (1980). Transitivity in
grammar and discourse. Language 53(1), 251-299.
Isatenko, Alexander V. (1965). Das syntaktische Verhaltnis der
Bezeichnungen von Korperteilen im Deutschen. Studia Grammatica 5, 7-27.
Kayne, Richard S. (1975). French Syntax. The Transformational
Cycle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Keenan, Edward L.; and Ralalaoherivony, Baholisoa (2000). Raising
from NP in Malagasy. Lingvisticae Investigationes 23(1), 1-44.
Kittila, Seppo (forthcoming). The anomaly of the verb
'give' explained by its high (formal and semantic)
transitivity. Linguistics 44-3.
Konig, Ekkehard; and Haspelmath, Martin (1998). Les constructions a
possesseur externe dans les langues d'Europe. In Actance et Valence
dans les Langues de l'Europe, Jack Feuillet (ed.), 525-606. Berlin
and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kratzer, Angelika (1989). An investigation of the lumps of thought.
Linguistics and Philosophy 12, 607-653.
--(1996). Severing the external argument from its verb. In Phrase
Structure and the Lexicon, Johan Rooryck and Lauri Zaring (eds.),
109-137. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
--(2003). The event argument and the semantics of verbs. Ms.,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
[http:ffsemanticsarchive.net/Archive/GU1NWM4Z/].
Landau, Idan (1999). Possessor raising and the structure of VP.
Lingua 107, 1-37.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar.
Volume 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Leirbukt, Oddleif (1997). Untersuchungen zum
"bekommen"-Passiv im heutigen Deutsch. Tubingen: Niemeyer.
Lenerz, Jurgen (1977). Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im
Deutschen. Tubingen: Narr.
Li, Charles N.; and Thompson, Sandra A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese. A
Functional Reference Grammar. Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Li, Yen-hui Audrey (2001). The ba construction. Ms., University of
Southern California, Los Angeles,
[http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/ealc/chinling/synformal.htm].
Maienborn, Claudia (2001). On the position and interpretation of
locative modifiers. Natural Language Semantics 9(2), 191-240.
Meinunger, Andre (forthcoming). Remarks on the projection of dative
arguments in German. In Datives and Other Cases, Daniel Hole, Andre
Meinunger, and Werner Abraham (eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
O'Connor, Mary C. (1996). The situated interpretation of
possessor-raising. In Grammatical Constructions. Their Form and Meaning,
Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), 125-156. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Payne, Doris; and Barshi, Immanuel (eds.) (1999). External
Possession. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Perlmutter, David (ed.) (1983). Studies in Relational Grammar.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
--; and Joseph, Brian (eds.) (1990). Studies in Relational Grammar
3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
--; and Postal, Paul (1983). Towards a universal characterization
of passivization. In Studies in Relational Grammar, David Perlmutter (ed.), 3-29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Primus, Beatrice (1999). Cases and Thematic Roles--Ergative,
Accusative and Active. Tubingen: Niemeyer.
--(2004). Proto-roles and case selection in optimality theory. Ms.,
Arbeiten des SFB 282 "Theorie des Lexikons" Nr. 122,
Universitat zu Koln.
Reis, Marga (1985). Mona Lisa kriegt zuviel. Vom sogenannten
"Rezipientenpassiv" im Deutschen. Linguistische Berichte 96,
140-155.
Rohdenburg, Gunter (1974). Sekundare Subjektivierungen im
Englischen und Deutschen. Vergleichende Untersuchungen zur Verb- und
Adjektivsyntax. PAKS-Arbeitsbericht Nr. 8. Bielefeld: Cornelsen-Velhagen
& Klasing.
Schwarzschild, Roger (1999). Givenness, AvoidF and other
constraints on the placement of accent. Natural Language Semantics 7,
141-177.
Sells, Peter (1987). Aspects of logophoricity. Linguistic Inquiry 18(3), 445-479.
Shibatani, Masayoshi (1994). An integrational approach to possessor
raising, ethical datives, and adversative passives. BLS 20, 461-486.
Talmy, Leonard (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure
in lexical forms. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol.
3, Timothy Shopen (ed.), 57-149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
--(2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Tsao, Feng-fu (1987). A topic-comment approach to the ba
construction. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 15(1), 1-53.
Tuggy, David (1980). [??]Ethical dative and Possessor omission si,
Possessor ascension no!. Workpapers of the SIL 24, 97-141.
Vergnaud, Jean-Roger; and Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (1992). The
definite determiner and the inalienable constructions in French and
English. Linguistic Inquiry 23, 595-652.
Wunderlich, Dieter (1996). dem Freund die Hand auf die Schulter
legen. In Wenn die Semantik arbeitet. Klaus Baumgartner zum 65.
Geburtstag, Gisela Harras and Manfred Bierwisch (eds.), 331-360.
Tubingen: Niemeyer.
Wunderlich, Dieter (2000). Predicate composition and argument
extension as general options--a study in the interface of semantic and
conceptual structure. In Lexicon in Focus. Studia Grammatica 45, Barbara
Stiebels and Dieter Wunderlich (eds.), 247-270. Berlin: Akademie.
Zhang, Ning (1998a). The interactions between construction meaning
and lexical meaning. Linguistics 36(5), 957-980.
--(1998b). Argument interpretations in the ditransitive
construction. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 21, 179-209.
Notes
* This article is a revised and heavily extended version of Hole
(2004). While Sections 2 and 3 were transferred from the other paper
largely unchanged, Section 4 has been extended considerably. Section 5
is new. I would like to thank two Linguistics reviewers who made me
sharpen my points and corrected inadequacies of a preliminary version.
The following people were among those who helped me in the course of
developing the analysis presented here: Daniel BOring, Jacquelyn Deal,
Andreas Dufter, Volker Gast, Joachim Jacobs, Gerson Klumpp, Ekkehard
Konig, Elisabeth Leiss, Peter Siemund, Tham Shiao Wei, Zhang Jie, and
Zhang Ning. Remaining errors are mine. Correspondence address: Institut
fur Deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munthen,
Schellingstr. 3/RG, 80799 Munich, Germany. E-mail: hole@lmu.de.
(1.) The following abbreviations are used in glosses:
ACC--accusative; BA--cf. Section 3.2.; CL--classifier; DAT--dative;
IND--indicative; NOM--nominative; PASS--passive marker; PRF--perfective
aspect; PRT--particle; PST--past tense. I only provide glosses for
morphosyntactic features if they are immediately relevant to the
discussion at hand.
(2.) Among researchers with an intimate knowledge of continental
European languages, the idea of syntactic possessor raising has often
met with criticism. Cf. Tuggy (1980) for such a strongly opposing view.
(3.) The s-variable is Wunderlich's event argument.
(4.) Cf., for example, O'Connor (1996) for a diligent overview
of relevant contrasts in Northern Pomo which, even though the possessor
raising/ascension terminology is agnostically adopted, points to the
manifold semantic-pragmatic differences between "raised" and
"nonraised" structures. Unfortunately, O'Connor does not
challenge the claim of truth-conditional irrelevance of the choice
between the two structures.
(5.) Independently of the external possession paradigm, Shibatani
(1994) makes an attempt to explain extra argumentality or, as he calls
it, extra-thematic licensing of arguments, in terms of relevance. It is
not clear to me what the exact empirical predictions of a relevance
account as opposed to a thematic-role account are and what they mean in
terms of a syntactic and semantic implementation. However,
Shibatani's work must be acknowledged for widening the perspective
such that a broad range of extra argamentality facts from many different
languages are integrated into a single picture.
(6.) The general ideas in the arguments of Sections 2.1 through 2.3
have been around in the literature for decades, even though their exact
shapes may differ. The argument in Section 2.4 is from Hole (2005) and,
to the best of my knowledge, it constitutes a new finding together with
the additional argument delivered in Section 4.3.1.
(7.) Note that extra arguments in English do not occur in
postverbal position as frequently as, for instance, in German. They are
restricted to certain configurations with directional complements that
encode bodily action. Extra subjects are more widespread in English (see
Section 3.1).
(8.) As already mentioned in Note 6, this argument is from Hole
(2005).
(9.) In German, extra arguments in subject function as defined here
are extremely rare, if they exist at all. The reason for this seems to
be that German allows PPs in its prefield so easily. A possible example
of a sentence with a construction as in (12) is provided in (i).
(i) Der Baum treibt B1atter.
the tree drives leaves
'The tree starts growing leaves.'
Whether this example qualifies as a case in point depends on
whether der Baum 'the tree' is interpreted as a marginal
agent, or as a kind of landmark (see Section 5.2 for the justification
of the landmark role). According to the specifications in that section,
we would be dealing with a clear landmark argument only if the tree is
not at all agentively involved in the eventuality of growing leaves. Two
other sentence patterns have landmark subjects in a rather
straightforward fashion, but the complements of the underived verb stems
are encoded in a special complement type with the derived verbs; cf.
(ii) and (iii).
(ii) Der Platz steht voller Menschen.
the square stands full. of people
'The square is full of people (standing there).'
(iii) Der Saal halltewider vor Larm.
the haal resonated because.of noise
'The hall resonated with noise.'
Even though these patterns should definitely be covered by an
overarching theory of extra-argumental voice as propagated here, I will,
for the sake of perspicuity, stick to the more narrowly defined type of
construction in which the syntactic core functions of extra arguments do
not downgrade the initial internal arguments to complement PPs. For one
more German sentence pattern with extra-argumental subjects, but demoted
initial core arguments, cf. (iv).
(iv) Paul wackelte mit den Ohren.
Paul wiggled with the ears
'Paul was wigging his ears.'
(10.) I would like to thank Waltraud Paul for reminding me of this
sound criterion of nontopichood.
(11.) Kittila (forthcoming) demonstrates that 'give'
verbs are irregular in many languages in that they display idiosyncratic properties not found with other verbs of the same larger class,
typically ditransitives. This fits in well with Hole's (2005)
reservations against 'give' verbs as points of departure for
the elucidation of clause patterns with multiple arguments.
(12.) This generalization only holds cum grano salis. Schwarzschild
(1999) and Buring (forthcoming) show convincingly that focal accents on
adjuncts are sufficient to focus-mark constituents that are larger than
those adjuncts. What matters is that the focal material outside the
adjunct must be given (in the sense of Schwarzschild 1999: 151-152). A
pertinent example from Buring (forthcoming) is provided in (i) (Buring
uses German examples for illustration because even critical readers will
readily agree that the German PP in [i] cannot be a complement, while
its right-peripheral counterpart in the English translation might give
rise to the idea that with his daughter is a complement).
(i) Q: Zur Tatzeit hat Lolek mit seiner Frau einen Einkaufsbummel
gemacht. Aber was ist Boleks Alibi?
'Q: At the time of the crime, Lolek was out shopping with his
wife. But what was Bolek's alibi?'
A: Bolek hat [[mit seiner TOCHter einen Einkaufsbummel
gemacht].sub.FOC]. Bolek has with his daughter a shopping.stroll made
'A: Bolek was [out shopping with his DAUGHTER].'
In this example, einen Einkaufsbummel gemacht 'been out
shopping' may not bear a focus accent, since this bit of
information has been given about Lolek in the preceding context; on the
other hand it forms part of the new information about Bolek, and
therefore it is part of the larger constituent which comprises the whole
focus of the sentence. Under these conditions, a focus accent on an
adjunct suffices to focus-mark the whole sentence minus the subject (and
the auxiliary).
If this is so, and if a parallel argument can be stated for
sentences as in (25) and (25'), what remains of the claim that the
possibilities of focus projection may serve as a diagnostic for unmarked
word order in the question at hand? Isn't the whole diagnostic
rendered useless by Schwarzschild's and Buring's findings? It
fortunately isn't. The point is that Hohle's original
generalizations remain fully valid if (near-)empty, out-of-the-blue
contexts are chosen. Hohle's patterns may not be reproduced in all
discourse environments, but they are stable if the context is
(near-)empty. This is the reason why one should be more careful to
choose only indefinite arguments, and avoid all presuppositional
elements, in examples used to argue for a specific canonical word order.
(13.) Such configurations are typical of most languages of Europe,
except for some languages on its (insular) fringes, among them Breton,
English, and Turkish (cf. Bossong 1998).
(14.) Vergnaud and Zubizarreta (1992) defend a similar claim for
French indirect objects in what they call the "inalienable
construction" in French. Even though the general ideas of Vergnaud
and Zubizarreta's proposal are similar to the proposal as laid out
in Section 4.2, the present analysis is not just a variant of the
analysis of the inalienable construction in French. See Section 4.3.2
for more discussion.
(15.)(i) below is a list of semantic types and variables/values as
used by Kratzer (1989 and elsewhere) and here. The confusing homonymies
are regrettable, but I don't see that it would be a step ahead if
I, as opposed to Angelika Kratzer, proposed a more perspicuous system.
(i) semantic type variables/values
truth-value: <t> 1 (true), 0 (false)
individuals: <e> x, y, z
eventualities/situations: <s> e (dynamic eventualities,
events proper), s (states)
(16.) It is confusing indeed that V&Z compare the alienable and
inalienable uses of nouns to verbs that may be used transitively (as
causatives), or intransitively, but then represent the allegedly
"transitive" inalienable variants of nominal predicates with a
single argument slot throughout their paper (consequently the predicates
corresponding to alienable uses of nouns have no argument slot at all in
V&Z's paper).
(17.) The diagrams in V&Z (1992: 614) are obviously intended to
contribute to the elucidation of this problem, but the representations
are somewhat idiosyncratic, and even with some effort I am not sure that
I can fully understand them.
(18.) The semantics of extra argumentality of the following
examples from the survey in Section 3 have thus been clarified: (13a),
(13b), (14), (15), (16), (17), (26a)-(26c).
(19.) (i) and (ii) are Dowty's (1991: 572) lists of
proto-agent and proto-patient properties, respectively:
(i) volitional involvement in the event or state sentience (and/or
perception) causing an event or change of state in another participant
movement (relative to the position of another participant) (exists
independently of the event named by the verb)
(ii) undergoes change of state incremental theme causally affected
by another participant stationary relative to movement of another
participant (does not exist independently of the event, or not at all)
(20.) The contrast which is relevant in (43) recurs in different
parts of grammar, and accordingly it has several names. One area where
it surfaces is in the area of reflexivization (cf. Sells' [1987]
PIVOT vs. SOURCE/SELF, Hole's [2002: 292] somatophoricity vs.
logophoricity, or the triggering of de-re/de-dicto contrasts in
intensional semantics).
(21.) As alluded to in the preceding note already, another domain
where consciousness/ sentience is dealt with on a par with locatedness
vis-a-vis something else is reflexivization, as treated in Hole (2002:
290-293). It is argued there that so-called untriggered reflexives in
English may, among other things, either indicate that the predication in
which the reflexive occurs reports the mental state of the reflexive
participant, or that an eventuality is presented with the reflexive
participant as the landmark of the eventuality. I would like to thank
Robert Mailhammer and Theo Vennemann (pers. comm.) in this context, who
reminded me of the well-known Germanic case syncretism which had led to
a merger of the locative and the dative in Old High German already. I
must, however, leave for another occasion the more exact explication of
the historical implications of my proposal.