[Lexicog] Re: accusatory observation?

[Rudolph C Troike]

	(First let me preface a plea, in responding to posts, _not_ to
retain all of the preceding messages. Most e-mail systems allow previous
material to be omitted or deleted. It gets confusing, particularly reading
the digest, to have the same messages repeated five or six times over,
with Mike's original post winding up both first and last!)

	I was amused by Mike Cahill's original query, since the classroom
example is one I do myself every year to illustrate differences in
participant (theta) roles in relation to verbs in describing events in
different languages.

	John Roberts' post demonstrates that the issue, on one dimension,
is precisely a lexicographical one, since it gets to the heart of what
participant roles can occur with particular lexical verbs, and how
different _perspectives_ can be encoded in different languages. The
COBUILD dictionary properly notes that the verb DROP in English is
ambiguous as between an intentional and an accidental interpretation
(certainly something a reader would need to know).

	Another way of looking at this, or expressing it, is to say that
the lexical item DROP allows two different configurations of participant
roles (three, actually, counting the "intransitive", or "unaccusative"
use:
	DROP	<Agent, Theme/Patient>
		<Theme, Experiencer (=Dative)>
		<Theme>

	As Fillmore long ago pointed out, Subjectivalization in English
involves a hierarchy of participant (theta) roles (which he originally
called Cases), with Agent ranking over Theme/Patient or Experiencer, and
others, so that preferentially if an Agent is present, it will be selected
as Subject. This is what gives the "intentional" reading, i.e., an
deliberate act by a sentient being.

	In many languages, however, as Fritz Goerling showed for German,
and for Spanish, there is no lexical item corresponding to DROP. This is
precisely where the lexicographical significance comes in. In order to
describe the same event, one must "unpack" the semantics of DROP in its
"transitive" use, and see that it is essentially:

		DROP = {FALL} + {CAUSE}

i.e., "cause to fall", "allow to fall". The expression of this can be
accomplished in some languages by a Causative suffix on the verb. In
languages like German and Spanish, it will be accomplished by a type of
"serial verb" construction, equivalent to "let fall", or "allow to fall",
or "make fall". Given the typology of another language, it might even be
possible to predict which alternative the language would take in
describing the event with this perspectival choice of participant roles.

	However, if we take the second configuration, with <THEME/SOURCE,
EXPERIENCER>, most languages (I don't say "all", Mike), lacking a lexical
item corresponding to DROP, will utilize one more closely corresponding to
English FALL (the root item in the causative construction above). This is
where Subjectivalization rules will differ for languages. In English, the
animate/human EXPERIENCER is more likely to be chosen as Subject (compare
English "I like X" compared to most other languages with the equivalent of
"X pleases me"; note earlier "Methinks that cloud is like a camel"
compared to modern "I think that cloud is like a camel", where the overt
morphological distinction between Dative and Nominative was replaced with
an overriding Nominative for Subject, thus obscuring the semantics).

	So, "I dropped the pen" (accidentally) will be encoded variously
as something often equivalent to

	    "To-me fell (from-)the pen"

where "the pen" may or may not be encoded as the SOURCE of the effect TO
ME (i.e., Dative) or ON ME. (In the Southern US, it is common to say
things like "My car broke down on me", where "on me" expresses the
EFFECTED participant, the one who suffered from the event.) Thus, a
Southerner might be likely to say,

	    "The pen went and fell on me". or

            "The pen fell right out of my hand."

making clear that "1st person" here is not AGENT. In Spanish, this would
be
	    "Se me cayo' la pluma." (To me fell [itself] the pen.)

	In the third configuration, with only the bare THEME, the
necessary result would be, given that if there is only one argument with
the verb, it must become the Subject:

	     The pen dropped/fell.

Here it is possible to interchange DROP and FELL in English. Optionally,
the LOCATION/SOURCE of the theme may be expressed with a prepositional
phrase with "from"

	     The pen dropped/fell from my hand.

(Since this involves a "change of location", it may involve some
additional morphology in some languages, or a case suffix to express what
in English is expressed with the preposition FROM.)

	Now back to Mike's original question, which was slightly
ambiguous: I understood that he was asking for examples prior to doing any
analysis, but it was not clear whether he was talking about the kind of
interpretation I have been discussing here, or whether he was simply
interested in the possible pragmatics of the utterance "You dropped the
pen" as a statement or an accusation. Of course this leads us into other,
extra/super-lexicographical territory. I took the classroom experiment to
be eliciting merely a description of the event observed, since that is
what I normally get in class when I ask for a description of the action (I
usually once hold the pen and obviously let it fall from my tight grasp
and then hold it loosely and casually let it roll off my hand while not
looking at it.)

	So when a desription is elicited in this way, the utterance can
have a purely neutral interpretation. But if you see something, such as
pen, fall off a person onto the ground, and you want to draw that person's
attention to the event, it can be interpreted as simply that, an alert or
advisement, assuming that the person has not noticed the event. On the
other hand, if the person has seen it happen, and the sentence is uttered,
the obvious redundancy of it invites a different Gricean interpretation,
since this violates the quantity maxim, and may be seen as insulting the
hearer by suggesting that he is clumsy or stupid. If the speaker has been
waiting for the hearer, say, a defeated enemy, to sign a peace treaty, and
the hearer, after some hesitation, drops the pen and shows signs of
reluctance to sign, the utterance -- once again insultingly redundant --
may indeed be an accusation of intent not to resign, and imputing AGENCY
to the Subject argument, i.e., deliberate action. (Another common
scenario would involve the pen having fallen from the individual
unobserved by the individual, and the speaker having picked it up, and in
proferring it to the owner, by way of explanation and exculpation (as not
having stolen it), would typically say 'You dropped your pen'.) Each of
these scenarios might or might not receive different expression in
different languages, depending on the strength/universality/ranking of
various Gricean maxims.

	One question for Wayne -- does Cheyenne have the typical Algonkian
Inverse marker, to indicate whether the 2nd person prefix is to be
interpreted as Agent or Patient/Affected?

	Rudy Troike
	University of Arizona




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