Intransitivity and Stativity in English causative verbs. Nothing has to (really) change here

MANGIALAVORI RASIA, MARÍA EUGENIA; AUSENSI, JOSEP

Londres

Congreso; 2019 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain; 2019

Queen Mary University of London

Intransitivity and Stativity in English causative verbs. Nothing has to (really) change hereWe analyze a construction which, to our knowledge, has gone largely overlooked in the literature,even if it has central implications for the study of argument structure, argument alternations andalternatives in verb formation/derivation in English. Object-less (intransitive) causatives[IC] like(1) feature a subject (an inanimate entity) naturally interpreted as cause(r) of a potential changeof-state (COS); crucially, the affected entity is (semantically&syntactically) unrealized. Even ifnot fully (freely) productive as in other languages (vs. e.g. Romance, Greek, Alexiadou 2014; M.Rasia 2018), English shows a productive (semi)regularity deserving to be explored. We note that:(1). a. Smoking kills. b. Alcohol dehydrates. c. Rice constipates. d Bleach disinfects.e. Shaving creams irritate. f. Sunlight oxidizes and discolors g. Normal dryers wrinkle.1. ICs denote (I[ndividual]-L[evel]) states, not change of state. Besides not allowing perception reports(IL-diagnostic)(2), standard tests (Maienborn 2004;Rothmayr 2007) show that ICslack habitualreading in the present (3); are infelicitous in what-x-did frames(4) and contexts forcing eventivereadings(5) (see 8); can be located in time but not in space (6), which is the expected pattern forpure (eventless) states. Unlike events, modals (must) give epistemic (not deontic) readings (7).(2). #I saw smoking kill. (vs. I saw John kill Tom)(3). Smoking (#regularly) kills. (vs. John (regularly) kills animals)(4). #What alcohol did was dehydrate.(5). #What happened was that rice constipated.(6). #Shaving creams irritate in the bathroom.(7). Smoking must kill. (OK Smoking probably has property x | #it is under obligation to kill)2. Like middles, ICs do not license episodic readings?i.e., they do not refer to an actual event thathas occurred; rather, they simply report an (inherent) property of the subject. In this sense, theyinstantiate what Lekakou (2005: 88) calls dispositional generic. In contrast to dispositionalhabituals (8)a, which ?assert the existence of a pattern of regularly recurring events?, the truth ofICs (8)b does not depend on whether there were (burning) events in the past; rather, it is true invirtue of properties inherent to the subject. Instead, dispositional habituals cannot be true if therewere no events of John helping people (Krifka et al.1995). A similar condition draws a contrastbetween ICs and Levin?s ?intransitives? given by Null/Unspecified Object Alternation (8). Thisis consonant with data (see (11)-(13) below) supporting a distinct (non-Null/Arb object)structure.(8). a. John helps homeless people (#but he hasn?t helped anybody yet).b. Chromic acid burns (but it has not been used to burn stuff yet).c. This dog bites (#but it hasn?t bitten anybody yet). (pro-Arb Object Altern., Levin 1993)3. ICs share with middles the genericity of an otherwise eventive predicate. Yet, ICs are differentin that the sole DP is an external argument, not an internal one. The dispositional property is thusnot attributed to the undergoer of change of state [COS], but to its (potential) causer. Consistentwith stativity, restriction to generic tenses is key: note that perfect tense is possible for maximallydifferent monadic (inchoative) causatives (if available(*kill)). Hence the oddity of (5)|(9).(9). *Smoking killed/#Alcohol dehydrated/#Shaving creams irritated/#Rice constipated.4. ICs reflect the basic definition of dispositional causation (10), insofar as in ICs the predicationrelates a disposer y (holder of a property), a dispositional state e, a manifestation e′, and a (nonepisodic) eventuality description p. Predictable semantic restrictions hold for ICs (e.g. Necessarycondition: have the relevant property to generate the COS named by V (#water dries) (Fara 2001).(10). Dispositional causation: (a) y is the holder of e, (b) e is a state that directly causes e′ceteris paribus, (c) e′ instantiates p (d) y is disposed toward p. (Copley 2018: 13)5. In ICs, COS verbs allow constructions in which the object is unexpressed, challenging a longheld constraint (Rappaport & Levin 1998, 2010; Levin & Rappaport 1995, 2005). Levin (2017)argues that if a verb encodes a COS predicated of a theme, such theme must be expressed due tothe ?patient realization condition? which arises ?because to know that a state holds requireslooking at the entity it holds of? (e.g. *John breaks/*killed, see also Rappaport 2008). ICs arecounterexamples to this constraint, inasmuch as they instantiate atransitive variants showing that COS verbs can allow object-less constructions with logical consequences: notably, the state thatholds, holds of a different argument/participant(causer). This result isfully coherent with 7 below.ANALYSIS.There are important reasons to argue that ICs are not null-object constructions. They donot allow null-object-oriented depictive predication; adjectival predicates (licensed by null/arbarguments, e.g. Il dottore visita [] nudi, ?The doctor visits [] naked? Rizzi 1996) and null objectquantification (bare molti in Italian) fail in (11) In Romance ICs, ne-cliticization and inchoativepassive morphology are consequently disallowed (12). ICs are productive with unpassivizableverbs (Object-Experiencer statives like sadden) and they do not bind reflexive pronouns (13).(11). *Smoking kills dead/depressed/many. (vs. John cooks healthy/John eats a lot)(12). Fumare (*ne/*si) uccide. (Italian)(13). Bad news sadden (*myself).6. For these empirical, but also for theoretical reasons, ICs seem better analyzed as original monadic(intransitive) realizations. Just as in other Causative-Stative constructions noted in English, theexternal-argument-introducing head responsible for the causative component is complemented,not by a COS-introducing (the internal-argument-licensing proc head), but by a rhematicprojection in which √ specifies the kind of change potentially triggered by the subject (RhemeP,Ramchand 2008, 2013), in a configuration like (14). As for the syntax-semantics interface andthe important body of literature on direct mapping between semantic (event) composition andargument structure realizations, ICs are empirically crucial as they show that non-realization ofthe internal argument consistently correlates with lack of change-of-state (sub)event instantiation(standardly attributed to the internal-argument licensing head, Levin & Rappaport 1995, 2005;Hale & Keyser 1993, 2005 i.a.). This explains the dispositional (non-episodic) causation flavorof ICs, along with the stative (ILP) behavior shown (recall (1)-(5)). Arguably, as there is notheme, there is no COS-event-coding component in the semantic/syntactic composition of VP.(14). vP [DP cause/trigger [vINITº, RHEME √] Stative-Causative (Ramchand 2008)7. ICs challenge major generalizationson the causative alternation. ICs are problematic for (i)the commonlyshared assumption that the internal argument is a constant (Hale&Keyser 1992)/invariableconstituent in the causative alternation; (ii)the prediction that unique arguments in COS verbs areinterpreted by default as themes (cf. Default Linking Rule, Levin & Rappaport 1995, 2005). ICsshow that a defective interpretation of unique arguments in causative verbs as cause is possibleand natural. SUMMING UP: ICs establish a certain regularity in English, allowing a structurewith distinct aspectual and syntactic properties. Lack of eventivity, ILP (stative) predication,restriction to generic tenses, along with default interpretation of the unique DP of a causative verbas a cause(r)rather than as an undergoer (theme) consistently contribute to a distinct, non-episodicpredication basically reflecting dispositional causation (Fara 2001; Copley 2018).8. Remaining issues: ICs show quirky constraints to productivity. A pressing question is why somecanonical causative verbs (e.g. break) fail to yield ICs in English (but ok in Romance). Apossibility is that English external-causation change of state verbs are to be split into two differentclasses with regard to the type of causation involved: while causative verbs like those in (1) allow(stative) eventualities that come about as a result of some inherent property (ILP state) of thecause(r), causative verbs of the sort break or destroy instead resist such (stative) representations(e.g. *Strong winds break/*Earthquakes destroy). Apparently, in English, these verbs behave likecore internally-caused COS verbs (e.g. The flower bloomed/wilted) in that such eventualities canbe only seen as coming about as direct consequence (result) of internal physical characteristics ofthe theme. Since the potential to exert change in ICs is predicated of the causer, and no themeargument figures in the representation, unproductivity in verbs restricted to internal (vs. external)causation simply falls out (*Fertilizers bloom/okBleach whitens). This suggest language-specificrestrictions (dependent on lexically-coded features). As Romance systematically allows COSverb ICs, including destroy analogues (i.e., verbs not allowing IC in English; cf. La ideologíadestruye. ?Ideology destroys?), nontrivial crosslanguage variations in this respect seem possible.