Heidi Harley: Unaccusatives and special meaning (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi all --

v. nice examples, marf! here's another one, with "break" itself

the wave broke (on the shore)
*the shore broke the wave

it seems to me that i had once heard of or thought of some others
along those lines but can't remember 'em anymore. Rolf, do you?

my position w/r to the stacking of little v, as martha says
below, has always been that (within lexical items) it's not.
it's always seemed to me that the semantic 'feel' for an
embedded inchoative in sentences like "m. cleared the table"
comes from our understanding of how the world works. After
all, in "M. made the table clear/ M. made J. happy..." etc.
there's no inchoative, and yet we understand the table to have
become clear and John to have become happy.

This makes me want to re-open a question for you
all. In my own little universe of argument structure, I can
distinguish, to my own satisfaction, between causatives
(transitive open, give, put), inchoatives (intransitive open,
arrive, fall), semelfactives (hit, cough), verbs of
creation/destruction (foal, build, eat) and states (know, have).
Causatives and inchoatives, and the verbs of creation
and destruction, are mostly Vendler's accomplishments.

Here's the problem: Most of Vendler's acheivements
(distinct from semelfactives because they involve a change
of state, and are not iterated in the progressive) don't
fit, unless they have the same structure as accomplishments.
If that's so, then the fabled difference between acheivements
and accomplishments must be an encyclopedic effect: because
we *know* that kicking the bucket, winning the
race, and reaching the top only takes an instant in time,
the interpretive effects that caused Vendler to
distinguish them in the first place are effects of
interaction with encyclopedic structure, much like
the inference that an inchoative must be entailed by
a causative. At least, this is what I hope is true.
If it is, then I don't need to revise my ideas about
how argument structure and event structure interact;
if it's not, then I need to make room for acheivements.

But there really are differences between accomplishments
and acheivements, notably the "pre-event" focus that
you get in the progressive (contrast "Mary's winning
the race" with "mary's building the house"). Others are
discussed by Anna Mittwoch in her paper in the Belgian
journal of linguistics, "In Defense of Vendler's
Achievements." (her actual arguments escape me at this
precise second because it's been a long time since i
read it -- I'll go back and recheck soon).

But I was just wondering what take you all had on this
problem. I know a number of folks have the same wish that
I do (that accomplishments and acheivements do not differ
significantly in argument structure)... but are there
arguments? or is it all motivated theory-internally, as
it is for me? I think the "inference to pre-event
progressives" approach has some plausibility (esp if
you accept the argument about inchoatives that I want to
sell), but it'd be nice if there were real reasons. (E.g.
VPs that could be manipulated by object selection
into being accomplishments with one object but achevements
with another... it occurs to me that "break" might be
an example:

john is breaking the record  --> achievement, pre-event focus
mary is breaking the news    --> is this an accomplishment?
                                  internal event focus?

let me know if you have any thoughts or references I should
know about --

all the best, hh



>-- Original Message --
>Date:         Wed, 6 Feb 2002 09:26:42 -0700
>Reply-To: The Distributed Morphology List
>              <DM-LIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
>From: Martha McGinnis <mcginnis at ucalgary.ca>
>Subject:      Martha McGinnis: Unaccusatives and special meaning
>To: DM-LIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>
>
>Dear DM-list,
>
>In their book "Unaccusativity," Levin & Rappaport-Hovav argue that
>verbs undergoing the causative alternation are underlyingly
>transitive.  One of their arguments is based on the claim that these
>verbs are more restricted in their intransitive use than in their
>transitive use:
>
>(1) a. I broke the record/the promise/the contract.
>     b.*The record/the promise/the contract broke.
>
>(2) a. The waiter cleared the table.
>     b.*The table cleared.
>
>If true, this claim is a bit problematic for a "DM-style" analysis of
>the alternation, whereby a root can combine either with a causative
>little-v or an unaccusative little-v (cf. Harley, Nishiyama, Marantz,
>Embick, L. Siegel, etc.).  Under such an approach, cases like (1) and
>(2) are unproblematic, but there should be no general asymmetry: that
>is, special uses of [unaccusative little-v + root] should be just as
>possible as special uses of [causative little-v + root].
>
>The theoretical "fixes" that first occurred to me turned out to make
>their own wrong predictions, so I went back to the claim itself. I
>think I've come up with some examples showing that actually there's
>no asymmetry: in addition to cases like (1)-(2), there are also
>intransitive uses that are impossible in the transitive, just as the
>DM-style analysis predicts:
>
>(3) a. My eyes popped.
>     b.*{Bill/The news} popped my eyes.
>
>(4) a. I snapped.
>     b.*{Bill/The news} snapped me.
>
>(5) a. The sun rose.
>     b.*{God/The earth's rotation} raised the sun.
>
>(6) a. My heart sank.
>     b.*{Bill/The news} sank my heart.
>
>(7) a. The penny dropped.
>     b.*{Bill/The news} dropped the penny.
>
>If there is no asymmetry, as these facts suggest, this settles a
>long-standing dispute I've had with Heidi Harley as to whether
>causatives properly contain inchoatives or not (i.e. whether or not
>causative little-v is always just added on top of unaccusative
>little-v).  She's always maintained they don't, and it would seem
>that she's right.
>
>If anyone has any comments, additional examples, etc., please send them
along.
>
>Cheers,
>Martha
>
>mcginnis at ucalgary.ca

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
Douglass 200E
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Ph: (520) 626-3554
Fax: (520) 626-9014
hharley at u.arizona.edu