What’s a direct object? Building constituent structure in an extended i* framework

The following is a précis of a talk I’ll be delivering remotely in Japan in November.  Questions are invited.

The problem:  Although the most common so-called “lexical causatives” take unaccusative verbs like “open” as their base, many languages allow lexical causatives of unergative verbs.  These are identified as “lexical” rather than syntactic because they (generally) exhibit the following properties:  an overt affix on the verb (rather than a periphrastic construction), a lack of complete productivity, a monoclausal syntax, and a failure of the causee to pass tests for agentivity that the corresponding subject of the base unergative verb would pass.  Although the subject of unergatives pattern with the subjects of transitive verbs in these languages, the causatives of the unergatives are syntactically identical to the causatives of unaccusative verbs, and the causee for the unergatives cannot be expressed in the manner of the causee of transitive verbs when these serve as the source for a causative.  In fact, in some languages transitives generally resist the lexical causative while unergatives do not.  Here we see some data from Georgian from Nash (2020) that illustrate the pattern of interest.  (1a) is a caustiave of an unaccusative, (1b) the causative of an unergative and (1c) the causative of a transitive.  In the aorist, the subject surfaces in the ergative case and the direct object in the nominative.

(1)  a.  keti-m msxal-i      ga=a-xm-o

       Keti-ERG pear-NOM prev=VAM-dry-AOR.3sg

‘Keti dried the pear.’

        b.  keti-m gogo          a-varjiš-a

       Keti-ERG girl.NOM VAM-exercise-AOR.3sg

‘Keti made the girl exercise.’

       c.  keti-m gogo-s otax-i da=a-lag-eb-in-a

       Keti-ERG girl-DAT room-NOM prev=CAUS-tidy-TS-CAUS-AOR.3sg

‘ Keti made the girl tidy up the room.’

This problematic behavior of unergatives under lexical causativizataion has been noted in recent years, manifesting in a variety of ways, for a number of languages, including Samoan (Tollan 2018), Kipsigis (Kouneli 2021), Quechua (Myler 2022), Plains Cree (Tollan & Oxford 2018), and Malayalam (Krishnan and Sarma, submitted).  The data were already well described in Relational Grammar (see, e.g., Harris 1981 on Georgian), where the behavior of unergatives fell under the general rule of Causative Clause Union.  The intuition behind the mechanics of Causative Clause Union are straightforward.  When a causative matrix clause (X causes Y) collapses with the embedded clause (Y), the structure will possibly contain multiple competitors for subjecthood and objecthood of the combined clause.  The causer gets precedence for subject of the causative, leaving a possible embedded subject without a grammatical relation.  Unaccusative subjects, which are underlying objects, pattern with transitive objects and have privileged call on the object relation.  One might expect unergative subjects to pattern with transitive subjects, which generally become indirect objects or optional oblique arguments, but the statement of Clause Union allows unergative subjects to acquire the object relation, if this is not already borne by an argument of the embedded clause.

Although Causative Clause Union describes the facts in, e.g., Georgian, this “solution” was a stipulation of the pattern, rather than an explanation of it.  For syntacticians in the Chomskyan tradition, the problem is how to avoid having the external argument of an unergative not share the fate of the external argument of a transitive, when embedded under a causative head.  A popular approach postulates that the external argument occupies a special subject position as an extra or high specifier of vP, rather than a specifier of voiceP, where transitive subjects sit (see e.g. Kouneli 2021).  While this puts the unergative subject in relation with the v that might resemble that of an unaccusative theme, in contrast to a transitive subject, it does so by breaking the theory.  Recent developments have led to a constrained and coherent theory of the syntax and semantics of v and voice (see e.g. Wood and Marantz 2017), and the extra subject position does not work even as an extension of this theory.  Rather, the proposal just seems a restatement of the problem: unergative subjects behave like transitive subjects outside the causative construction but like unaccusative subjects inside.

In this paper, I will describe an extension (really a simplification) of the theory of functional categories in Wood and Marantz that seems to provide an explanation of the behavior of unergatives in lexical causatives.  This approach will involve adopting and adapting the proposals of Legate (2014) concerning the connection between the semantic notions associated with external argumenthood (like “causer” and “agent”) and the syntactic positions into which bearers of external argument-type roles are introduced.

The Framework:  Wood and Marantz propose reducing the functional categories that introduce DP arguments, like voice, poss(essor), appl, and P, to a single functional head i*.  This head introduces a DP into the syntactic tree structure and relates it to another phrase.  For appl and voice, the phrase is a complement to the i*, with the introduced DP (the applied or external arguments) as the specifier of i*.  For a P, the directionality is reversed, and the introduced DP is the complement to the i* with the related phrase Merged second.  The “lexical” categorizing heads n, v, and a fell outside the system, and Wood & Marantz did not propose any analysis that related these heads to each other or to the properties of i*.  This implied that the set of items that could introduce DPs – v, and i* – have nothing essential in common (P was reduced to i*).

Following work by Armoskaite (2011), Shushurin (2021), and Newman (2021), Marantz (2022) proposed a further reduction of the system.  Verbs were analyzed as a structure with two i* heads, one above the other.  The lower i* head introduces the direct object (if there is one), with voice (also i*) taking this i*P with its direct object and introducing the external argument in its spec position.  (Intransitive verbs would involve an i* head that introduced no DP.)  i* itself is identified as a transitivity head, with values for transitivity indicating that it does or does not introduce a DP or is ambivalent about introducing a DP (+Trans, -Trans, øTrans).  This trivalent Trans feature recapitulates the trivalent voice of Kastner (2020) and others:  since voice and v now are the same feature, Trans, we expect them to exhibit the same range of values.  What we call a “verb,” then, is a transitivity head over a transitivity head.  The lower half of a verb is identical to the structure of a Preposition, with the difference between verbs and prepositions mostly a matter of their extended projections (if you project Aspect and Tense, you’re a verb, e.g.), as related to or conditioned by the root that adjoins to the i*.  Little n is a gender feature and little a – for “nominal” type adjectives of the Indo-European type, not adjectives of the Japanese type that behave like a special class of intransitive verbs – is an unvalued gender feature that will receive gender from a (modified) noun (the other, verbal, type of adjectives are treated like intransitive verbs syntactically, as far as this reduction to a minimal set of category features is concerned).

In this theory, “voice” and “v” are the same head and are distinguished configurationally, not featurally.  Because there is only a single argument introducing head, the theory of the way that certain meanings – certain theta roles – are distributed in syntactic structure cannot rely on statements such as, “voice projects the external argument of the verb.”  Following the lead of, e.g., Legate (2014), the theory requires that we separate the event structure denoted by the roots of nouns, verbs and adjectives from the semantic interpretation of syntactic structure.  In Marantz (2022) I explain this separation, relying on Jim Wood’s (2022) analysis of complex event nominalizations in Icelandic.  The root of an unergative verb like “cry,” for example, will point to a crying event that includes a crier.  But that information in itself does not tell us where a crier will be projected in a sentence.  The distribution of event arguments depends on the interaction of event semantics with the rules of interpretation for syntactic structure.  In the lexical causative of unergative “cry,” with the root “cry” adjoined to a transitivity head below the transitivity head that will introduce the causer, the “crier” can be introduced as the complement to the lower transitivity head.  Here it will receive the structural interpretation of an entity that undergoes a caused change of state, but also the role of the “crier.”  The interpretation of X cry-CAUSE Y is that X made Y into a crier (from a non-crier), i.e., that X caused Y to begin to cry.  The caused change of state semantics is entirely a function of the syntactic structure, not the root, but the “crier” role of the root is compatible with the object position in such a structure.

In the context of a theory of derivational morphology, Marantz (2022) elaborates on what we expect from root morphemes in the morphophonology.  Specifically, functional heads seem happy with phonologically zero Vocabulary Items; perhaps the phonologically null realization is the universal default for such morphemes.  Roots, on the other hand, may be zero, but roots in general lack aggressive homophony.  One expects there to be only a very limited set of zero roots in any given language, just like one expects there to be only a very limited set of roots whose phonological form is /k^hæt/.  The implication of this theory is that when a head is generally overt in a language, it most likely is a root rather than a functional morpheme.  The persistent overt realization of the “causative” morpheme in causatives of unergatives cross-linguistically suggests that the morpheme is a spell-out of a “causative” or “agentive” root attached to a transitivity (voice/v) head, rather than a Vocabulary Item realizing voice or v itself.

The Proposal:  Lexical causatives – causatives that do not introduce an additional event modifiable by temporal adverbials and in which a causee does not pass tests for agentivity – contain no more (and no fewer) functional heads than other (“regular”) transitive verbs in a language:  essentially, a transitivity head with a +Trans feature and a lower transitive head also with a +Trans feature.  The interpretation of causative constructions requires transitivity here.  The lower object is interpreted as a change of state predicate such that the causer, the external argument of the verb, causes the object to undergo a change of state.  This interpretation of the lexical causative is enforced by the semantics of a root that is adjoined to the higher transitivity feature (the “voice”) and is often identified as the “causative” morpheme.

In my conference talk, I’ll review why this analysis correctly limits the location of unergative “agents” in the direct object position to transitive causative constructions, contrasting with the themes of unaccusative verbs, that may appear as direct objects in intransitive sentences.  We’ll also review why unergative causees may not, in general, be expressed in the manner of the causees of transitive verbs under causativization.

Of particular interest are the features that might be associated with the overt “causative” morpheme across languages that allow lexical causatives of unergative verbs.  Following the work of Nash (2020) and of Krishnan and Sarma (2022), I will explore the morphology of Georgian and of Malayalam with the goal of explaining how the distribution of overt morphemes in these languages supports the claim that “causative” morphology isn’t spelling out a causative head or a voice head in most cases.  In Malayalam in particular, the distribution of overt morphology is telling.  When an unergative is not overtly marked, its overtly marked lexical causative behaves as explained above, in parallel to the causatives of unaccusatives.  However, overtly marked unergatives pattern with transitives under causativization.  We will see that this behavior follows from the role of the overt morphology in controlling the expression of the external argument of an unergative root.

References

Armoskaite, S. (2011). The destiny of roots in Blackfoot and Lithuanian (Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia).

Harris, A. C. (1981). Georgian syntax: A study in relational grammar. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics London, 33.

Kastner, I. (2020). Voice at the interfaces: The syntax, semantics, and morphology of the Hebrew verb. Language Science Press.

Kouneli, M.  (2021).  High vs. Low external arguments: Evidence from Kipsigis.  SAIAL, University of Potsdam, April 15, 2021.

Krishnan, G.G., & Sarma, V.M.  (2022).  Unlocking verbal forms in Malayalam:  Past tense is key.  Submitted.

Legate, J. A. (2014). Voice and v: Lessons from Acehnese (Vol. 69). MIT Press.

Marantz, A. (2022).  Rethinking the syntactic role of word formation.  In Bonet, N., et als., eds., Building on Babel’s Rubble, PUV, Université Paris 8, pp. 293-316.

Myler, N.  (2022).  Argument Structure and Morphology in Cochabamba Quechua (with occasional comparison with other Quechua varieties).  Boston University ms.

Nash, L. (2020). Causees are not agents. In Perspectives on causation (pp. 349-394). Springer, Cham.

Newman, E. S. B. (2021). The (in) distinction between wh-movement and c-selection (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Shushurin, P. (2021). Nouns, Verbs and Phi-Features (Doctoral dissertation, New York University).

Tollan, R. (2018). Unergatives are different: Two types of transitivity in Samoan. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 3(1).

Tollan, R., & Oxford, W. (2018). Voice-less unergatives: Evidence from Algonquian. In Proceedings of WCCFL (Vol. 35, pp. 399-408).

Wood, J., & Marantz, A. (2017). The interpretation of external arguments. The verbal domain, 255-278.

Wood, J. (2022).  Icelandic nominalizations and allosemy. Yale University book ms. lingbuzz/005004.