LINGUIST List 7.27

Sat Jan 6 1996

Disc: Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)

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  • Richard Ingham, Re: 7.2, Disc: Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)

    Message 1: Re: 7.2, Disc: Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)

    Date: Thu, 04 Jan 1996 15:07:42 GMT
    From: Richard Ingham <llsingamreading.ac.uk>
    Subject: Re: 7.2, Disc: Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995)


    As regards unaccusativity, the terminology issue is perhaps less important than an understanding of what the unaccusative hypothesis itself has to offer. In this connection, I wonder to what extent participants in this LINGUIST list discussion share my impressions of Levin & Rappaport-Hovav (1995).

    What I found striking in the book was the extent to which the work of argument selection in English was being done by membership of various semantic subclasses, NOT by the argument-structure property of whether the argument is internal or external. I don't see this as a criticism, except insofar as the authors maintain that unaccusativity is 'syntactically encoded' in the form of a lexical syntactic structure that distinguishes internal from external arguments (see e.g. pp. 279, 21). For example, the causative alternation is impossible with many verbs that are supposed to have only an internal argument, e.g.:

    1) They ... *arrived the goods/*fell the lamp/*departed the guests/*receded the danger

    2) They ... *languished the prisoners in jail/*persisted the recession/ *prospered the economy

    But a form of the alternation is found with verbs that L&R (p.81) describe as 'unergative':

    3) Mary walked the dog in the park/galloped the horse on the main road

    The availability of an argument structure with an internal but no external argument (the crux of the GB unaccusativity hypothesis) is thus not decisive for the syntactic alternation between Subject and Object NP found with certain English verbs. To handle cases like 1)-3), L&R bring in various additional assumptions, involving semantic notions such as 'verbs of appearance', 'externally caused' and 'coercion'. Again, I don't object, except that the work is being done by these semantic notions, not by argument alignment.

    To my mind, the least convincing part of the book is where L&R find that diagnostics for unaccusative/unergative class membership clash, as with agentive verbs of manner of motion. They then take the ad hoc step of postulating two lexical entries. The unaccusative one seems to be needed ONLY to deal with the presence in the sentence of words from what L&R (p.186) describe as a restricted number of resultative predicates such as _clear_, _free_ and _apart_. Independent evidence for the unaccusative entry is lacking:

    4) *The previously jumped/swum contestant 5) *There jumped/swam a prisoner (free) 6) *a jumpee, *a swimmee

    An unaccusative lexical representation with these verbs may get the theory out of a jam, but doesn't provide any particular insight. On the contrary, postulating that a monadic verb needs to specify its argument syntactically as internal or external (the unaccusative hypothesis) is what causes the problem here, it seems to me.

    After all this negative stuff, let me say wholeheartedly that I found the book an absolute delight to read, with a wealth of insightful discussion of the syntax and semantics of verbs in English and numerous other languages. But, at least as regards English, the idea that some surface intransitive verbs have an internal argument in their lexical syntactic representation doesn't convince this particular reader: a semantic account of 'unaccusative' phenomena (e.g. Dowty 1991) still gets my vote.

    Richard Ingham Department of Linguistic Science The University of Reading Whiteknights Reading RG6 6AA UK