Syntactic Alternations în English

FOREWORD

This book has grown out of the material gathered for an elective course taught to the fourth students of English at the University of Craiova, University of Bucharest and ‘Spiru Haret’ University in Bucharest since 2003.

Chapter 1 addresses the thorny problem of syntactic alternations in English focusing on the argument structure and its changes of transitive, unergative and ergative verbs in the compelling lexical-syntax framework proposed by Hale and Keyse’s series of breakthrough articles published in 1993, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2003.

Chapter 2 discusses the syntactic alternations given rise to by detransitive verbs in the same syntactic framework (Hale and Keyser, 2003) as well as in two other syntactic frameworks (Pesetsky, 1995 and Williams, 1997).

‘Syntactic Alternations in English’ targets mainly MA students and students who prepare their graduation papers. The reader is encouraged and trained to explore the reasons why an analysis is to be preferred to another and to uncover the rationale that motivates the explanatory superiority of a syntactic analysis over another.

I do hope the book will help my students become familiar with the methodological procedure of sentiently learning to argue in favour of or against a certain syntactic hypothesis. I thank them for their supportive feedback and intellectual curiosity they manifested when attending the course.

My special thanks go to my former teachers and good friends Persi Baciu, Pusi Cornilescu and Domnica Şerban for having read the manuscript at various stages of elaboration, for their academic advice and observations and for their having taught me to find delight in what I do.  

SYNTACTIC ALTERNATIONS IN ENGLISH

CANONICAL VS. DERIVED STRUCTURES

Chapter 1

0.1. Introduction

In this chapter we discuss several alternations in the syntax of English verbs, with special reference to alternations in transitivity, which are not reflected by corresponding alternations in morphological form.

By syntactic alternations we understand alternations such as the following:

(1) a. John broke the vase

b. The vase broke

(2) a. He narrowed his eyes and frowned

b. His eyes narrowed

(3) a. The cold turned the leaves red

b. The leaves turned red

The problem raised by these alternations concerns the important issue of what makes it possible for the same lexical verb-entry to realize in so different syntactic configurations. In addressing lexical properties, linguists have focused their attention on two distinct questions.

One is the question of mapping (linking) of the thematic specification of the lexical verb-entry to syntactic structure, i.e. which theta role should realize in which argument position. That is the concern of principles like Chomsky’s (1981) ‘Theta Criterion’, Baker’s (1988) ‘Uniform Theta Assignment Hypothesis’ (UTHA) or Grimshaw’s (1990) hierarchies that regulate the relations of prominence in argument structure mapping to syntactic structure. All these principles are revised below. Basically, such principles are, first of all, set to determine the number of arguments that need to be selected from the lexicon for each selection of the verb and, next, mapping/linking principles guide the order of merging (inserting) these arguments into the derivation.

The other question concerns the structure of the lexicon itself: do the verbs that appear to have different thematic structures correspond to one or more lexical entries? Until recently, the idea that the two syntactic realizations of the verbs above correspond to two distinct lexical verbs, listed as independent entries, has been quite pervasive. Nevertheless, studies on the lexicon have shown that there are generalizations that relate apparently distinct items and these generalizations cannot be just an accident.

Following the system proposed by Hale and Keyser (1993, 1998, 1999, 2000), the purpose of the present analysis is to identify the formal conditions that trigger syntactic alternations (mainly based on the operations of ‘conflation and ‘incorporation’). To do this we begin with an aside: a discussion of the notion of lexical entry, of the notion of lexical argument structure of predicates and the latter’s syntactic projection in the elementary terms of X-bar theory.

1.0. Background and Preliminaries. Theta Relations in the Lexicon and in Syntax.

1.1. Lexical entries

A lexical entry expresses the linguistic knowledge that a speaker of a given language possesses in relation to it. Lexical items include a collection of properties. Take, for instance, the lexical items book and run. Some of these properties cover aspects of phonology and morphology (which are language specific, and thus idiosyncratic) and a representation of lexical items’ semantic properties. Lexical entries also list their properties with respect to the categorial features they have: for instance, the fact that the lexical item book has the categorial feature [N] and that the lexical item run has the categorial feature [V].

1.2. Argument structure

A sentence always contains a predicate (an expression denoting an activity or an event) and at least one argument (an expression denoting the participant in the activity or the event). For example, in sentences such as the following:

(4) a. [The dog] died

b. [Everybody] laughed

c. [The policeman] arrested [the suspect]

d. [John] fears [ghosts]