[Lexicog] On defining verbs, etc.

[Rudolph Troike]

Sorry, Mike, it's b-a-a-a-ck! (generative semantics, that is). And sorry,
John, the sacred Projection Principle and X-bar schema are out, except as
informal devices for helping us poor mortals to cope with the abstract
processes involved. And yes, many non-Chomskyites are increasingly suggesting
that semantics drives a lot of universals found in syntax (which for Chomsky
is an illusory epiphenomenon, anyway).

Particularly since Ken Hale and Jay Keyser resurrected generative semantics
and gave it a respectable status as a pre-syntactic component respecting
X-bar principles, more and more of the generativist persuasion have joined
in finding ways to incorporate semantic elements into syntactic structures.
Hale & Keyser's classic examples involved location and locatum verbs, where
the use of a "light" verb "put" could appear in the surface, + a NP, or
the NP could be incorporated into the abstract verb position:

     He put the saddle on the horse  -->  He saddled the horse.
     She put the books on the shelf. -->  She shelved the books.

The locus of "light" verbs in an X-bar tree is indicated by vP ("little vP").

Causatives such as overt "make" in English are also light verbs, but the
overt verb seems to indicate more indirect causation, as opposed to direct
causation with incorporation:

     He made her dance around the room.
     He danced her around the room.

(This indirect vs direct causation was at the root of the objections to
the "kill" = "cause to die" proposal.)

Languages all over the world, especially SOV languages (Turkic, Korean,
Nahuatl, Quechua, Australian, etc.) make use of an overt CAUS morpheme
to derive transitives from intransitives, which in English is often
accomplished by use of a different surface lexical form, e.g.
       know : teach
       see  : show
       die  : kill
       eat  : feed
English itself used to have a CAUS suffix -yan which derived transitives,
but was lost after sometimes inducing a vowel-harmony (umlaut) change in
the stem vowel, leaving that as the residue appearing to be separate
lexical items:
       sit  : set  (<sittian)
       fall : fell (as to fell a tree <fallian)
      (food): feed (Old English fo:dian)

So it is not a giant leap to assume that where an overt CAUS affix does
not occur, a covert CAUS light verb is present (this speaks to the
universal issue). It is not dissimilar to attributing to English and
other Western European languages an abstract Q (question) morpheme, given
that most other languages in the world, including many Indo-European ones,
have an overt Q morpheme to signal "Question". It isn't necessary to assume
that every surface distinction made in every language must be represented
in all languages -- there is certainly room for idiosyncracy, as Korean
has an honorific suffix on verbs -- but features which independently appear
in unrelated languages throughout the world can reasonably be taken as part
of the universal structure.

Chomsky himself, in his evolving Minimalist Program, has reduced most of
syntax to set theory, reverse-engineering Montague (or Montagovian, if you
prefer) grammar so that he doesn't have to acknowledge indebtedness or
intellectual priority. Montague's work was explicitly logico-semantic, so
this brings the developing Chomskyian tradition closer to semantics, even
while Chomsky ignores semantic generalizations. Meanwhile, Talmy's and
Slobin's work on motion verbs shows strong universal tendencies, with
different languages fitting typologically into one of two or three classes
in regard to whether manner or direction is expressed in the verb, or
externally. Beth Levin's encyclopedic classification of English verbs shows
that most cluster on a semantic basis, and many of the classes have
counterparts in other languages. This whole approach forces one to focus
on where information is encoded in a sentence, and what may be expressed
in a verb or must be expressed externally to a verb, and how (again finding
typological parallels widespread among languages). Levin points out that
a knowledge of the semantic properties of a lexical item can often be a
sufficient clue as to its proper syntactic and collocational use. E.g.,
when a new item like "e-mail" entered your vocabulary, you probably did
not hesitate in using it in sentences like:

        I sent him an e-mail yesterday.
        I e-mailed him yesterday.

There is much more that could be said, but this is a taste of things to
come. I suspect that in another ten years, people will look back with
disbelief, and laugh at the absurd Chomskyan tree diagrams (much of
which he has himself disowned, such as AgrOP), where instead of angels
dancing on the head of a pin, we have heads in search of angels to dance
on them.

    Rudy

    Rudy Troike
    University of Arizona







 
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