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An Aspectual Classification of English Ditransitive Verbs John Beavers
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Abstract In this paper I examine the types of events associated with ditransitive verbs that describe caused possession by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proven fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive verbs of change of state and motion, suggesting a single, shared underlying analysis. However, I also show that there is considerable microvariation among ditransitive verbs in exactly how their aspectual properties are determined, with one key factor being how much of the meaning of each verb is entailed directly and how much is cancelable. On the basis of this I propose an aspectuallybased classification of ditransitive verbs quite similar to previously proposed classes of (in)transitive verbs. I also show that the particular analysis I develop may shed some light on which ditransitives participate in the dative alternation.
1 Introduction Since at least Dowty (1979), work on the semantics of non-stative verbs has focused extensively on event structure, in particular the way verbs categorize events into types, and how properties of different event types figure into the morphosyntax and semantic interpretation of predicates headed by these verbs. One of the most fruitful tools for exploring verb meanings has been their lexical aspectual properties, including in particular the property of telicity, i.e. whether or not a predicate encodes an inherent endpoint for the event (Verkuyl 1972, 1993; Dowty 1979, 1991; Tenny 1987, 1992, 1994; Krifka 1986, 1989, 1992, 1998; Jackendoff 1996, inter alia). For example, Tenny (1994) uses aspectual evidence to identify three major classes of (in)transitive predicates based on the types of changes they describe. In particular, different types of changes determine different “incremental theme” participants, i.e. John Beavers The University of Texas at Austin E-mail:
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participants that figure most directly into computing telicity via a homomorphic mapping to the event. Tenny’s predicate classes include creation/consumption, where the incremental theme is the patient, motion, where the incremental theme is the path of motion, and change-of-state, where the incremental theme is a property of the patient. (1)
a. John ate the sandwich.
(creation/consumption)
b. John moved the vase into the bedroom. c. John painted the barn red.
(motion) (change-of-state)
In (1a), the event progresses as John moves through the sandwich, and ends when the sandwich is all gone, in (1b) the event progresses as the vase progresses along the path, and ends when it reaches the end of the path, and in (1c) the event progresses as the barn gets redder, until it is fully red. As long as the predicate is clear about how much incremental theme there is — the amount of sandwich, the endpoint of the path, or the resultant degree of redness of the barn — we know when the event will end, and thus the predicate is telic. If the quantity of the incremental theme is left open in any way, atelicity results. Crucially, the central role of incremental themes in event structure — and the variety in types of incremental themes due to different types of changes — can only been illuminated by looking closely at aspectual properties and identifying which components of the predicate are responsible for them. However, despite the considerable amount of work on the aspectual properties of (in)transitive verbs that describe changes, one place where this methodology has not been applied in considerable detail is to the set of ditransitive verbs which describe caused possession, including give, send, and and throw. Syntactically, these verbs differ from (in)transitive verbs in that they are subcategorized for a causer subject, a theme direct object, and a third goal or recipient argument. This third argument is realized either as the first object of a double object construction as in (2a), which I call an indirect object (IO), or as a to PP as in (2b). Verbs that allow both realization options exhibit the so-called “dative alternation” (Fillmore 1965, 1968; Jackendoff and Culicover 1971; Green 1974; Oehrle 1976; Erteschik-Shir 1979; Barss and Lasnik 1986; Larson 1988; Gropen et al. 1989; Pinker 1989; Pesetsky 1995; Baker 1997; Krifka 1999, 2004; Arnold et al. 2000; Wasow 2002; Harley 2003; Beavers 2006; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2008, inter alia). (2)
a. Rich gave/sent/threw Barry the ball.
(IO variant)
b. Rich gave/sent/threw the ball to Barry.
(to variant)
Semantically, IO variants encode caused possession, while to variants usually encode caused motion. Thus it is often assumed that the two variants in (2) correspond to distinct event structures, represented in standard decompositional terms as in (3), indicating a causation event that embeds a caused HAVE vs. a caused GO TO event.1 (3)
a. Caused possession (IO variant): [ x CAUSE [ y HAVE z ] ] b. Caused motion (to variant): [ x CAUSE [ z GO TO y ] ]
1 I ignore the issue of whether the decompositions in (3) are lexical (Pinker 1989), syntactic (Harley 2005), or constructional (Goldberg 1995) event structures.
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Such event structures are distinct from the [ x CAUSE [ y BECOME α ] ] event types usually associated with caused change-of-state predicates (of patient y coming to be in state α), involving different universal subevent primitives that comprise the caused event. However, a question arises of whether the caused events for ditransitives are of a type wholly distinct from other types of changes (as tacitly assumed by e.g. Harley 2005, 34), or whether they involve some of the same universal primitives, in particular what is usually labeled a BECOME type event that encodes change-of-state (as assumed by Van Valin and LaPolla 1997, 126-128 or Ramchand 2008, 101-105) In this paper I construct a novel argument, based on aspectual evidence, that the event structures associated with ditransitives are in fact built from the same basic primitives that underlie (in)transitive verbs of change. I build on Beavers (2009, to appear) (building on Krifka 1998; Hay et al. 1999; Beavers 2006, 2008; Kennedy and Levin 2008), who proposes that many types of changes — including all three of Tenny’s classes in (1) — can be swept under a single analysis involving a complex homomorphic relationship between an event, a theme participant, and a property scale that measures the change undergone by the theme (`a la Kennedy and McNally 2005). This approach makes predications about the aspectual properties of (in)transitive change predicates, and I show that the same properties also obtain for caused possession predicates, suggesting a single, unified analysis for all of (1) and (2). To put it in decompositional terms, aspectual evidence shows us that all types of change, including caused possession, involve the same primitive BECOME-type event. However, I also show that ditransitives present an interesting puzzle for an analysis of change based on lexical aspect: unlike (in)transitive change predicates as in (1), the prototypical result of ditransitives — caused possession in particular — is often cancelable, which complicates in particular how telicity is computed. To account for this, I argue that most caused possession meanings can be decomposed into two components, a “prospective” portion that need not obtain, and a non-prospective portion that must obtain. Using aspectual diagnostics, I show that the non-prospective component differs considerably across predicate classes, but is always sufficient to determine telicity and other aspectual properties. The result is an aspectually-based classification much like Tenny’s classification of (in)transitive predicates. The resultant model has bearing on several questions that have been discussed in previous literature on ditransitives. First, caused possession predicates are not uniform in whether they show a semantic contrast in the alternation, leading Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008) to propose that the meaning each frame encodes is partly verb-sensitive. On the approach I outline, this follows directly from the aspectual classification. Some verbs have non-prospective meanings that inherently subsume the meanings of both frames, leading to a fixed meaning across the alternation. Others have weaker meanings that can be augmented by the meanings of the two frames, leading to a contrast in the alternation. Second, not all ditransitives allow the IO variant, suggesting that something about the meaning of the IO frame is incompatible with the event structures of particular verbs (Gropen et al. 1989; Pinker 1989; Krifka 1999, 2004). The approach I outline accounts for this in terms of incompatible constraints that hold at the final point in the events described by certain verbs, unifying related proposals by Krifka (1999, 2004) and Bresnan and Nikitina (to appear).
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In §2 I review recent work on the semantics of caused possession predicates and their verb-sensitivity, following Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008). In §3 I outline and update an aspectual analysis of scalar change for (in)transitives proposed in Beavers (2009, to appear), and in §4 I extend this analysis to caused possession predicates. In §5 I present an aspectual classification of caused possession predicates based on a cross-categorization by three key features: motion, manner of motion, and the nature of the result state. In §6 I show how this analysis makes predictions about which verbs participate in the dative alternation. I conclude in §7 with a discussion of the place of ditransitive verbs among verbs of change more broadly. 2 Background - caused possession Predicates 2.1 Indirect Object Variants I begin by reviewing the systematicity and variability among caused possession predicates based on previously discussed evidence, as well as their verb-sensitivity (recapping parts of Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2008). Gropen et al. (1989) and Pinker (1989) (building on Green 1974) classify English ditransitives that show one or both variants of the alternation, organized into those that license an IO (4) and those that do not (5), subgrouped by intuitive semantic class (Gropen et al. 1989, 243-244).2 (4)
(5)
a. Verbs that inherently signify acts of giving: give, pass, hand, sell, pay, trade, lend, loan, serve, feed b. Verbs of sending: send, mail, ship c. Verbs of instantaneous causation of ballistic motion (Verbs of throwing): throw, toss, flip, slap, kick, poke, fling, shoot, blast d. Verbs of continuous causation of accompanied motion in a deictically specified direction: bring, take e. Verbs of future having: offer, promise, bequeath, leave, refer, forward, allocate, guarantee, allot, assign, allow, advance, award, reserve, grant f. Verbs of instrument of communication: radio, email, telegraph, wire, telephone, netmail, fax (Verbs allowing an IO) a. Verbs of fulfilling: credit, present, entrust, supply, trust b. Verbs of continuous causation of accompanied motion in some manner: carry, pull, push, schlep, lift, lower, haul (Verbs disallowing an IO)
In general, verbs that allow an IO variant allow a to variant, but not conversely. I start with IO variants.3 2 Among the Gropen et al. classes, I ignore verbs of communicated message (e.g. tell, show) and proposition (e.g. say, assert), as well as manner of speaking verbs (e.g. shout, scream), which may be viewed of as metaphorical caused possession (i.e. caused mental attainment), but could be construed as verbs of comprehension. I also ignore benefactive IOs, which are paraphrasable by for rather than to (bake Marie a cake vs. bake a cake for Mary). I also set aside light verb uses of ditransitives as in give James a kick. 3 However, Bresnan and Nikitina (to appear) show that many verbs in (5) do appear with IOs, although not as frequently as those in (4); see §6. Adversative verbs such as envy also have IOs but lack to, e.g. *John envied his good looks to him; I ignore such verbs, focusing solely on caused possession.
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When one of these verb allows an IO, the IO must be capable of possession, something not true of corresponding to variants.4 Before discussing evidence for this, it is useful to get some idea of what possession is. Following Harley (2005), I assume that the notion of possession encoded in caused possession predicates is the same as that encoded by the verb have. Evidence for this comes from the systematic polysemy that have shows discussed by Tham (2005, 2006), which Beavers et al. (2009) argue is also evidenced in at least some caused possession predicates. In particular, Tham argues that have can express at least four relations. These include inalienable possession as in (6a), where the subject is essentially an argument of the relational DP object (see Partee 1999), and alienable possession as in (6b). Tham also identifies two other uses of have, which she refers to as a “control” use, where the subject has temporary control of the object but does not necessarily alienably possess it as in (6c), and a “focus” use, where the relationship between the arguments is determined by a rich context as in (6d), in a context of people being assigned things to clean. (6)
a. John has a sister. b. John has a car. c. John has the car (for the weekend). d. John has the windows (to clean).
(inalienable possession) (alienable possession) (control possession) (focus possession)
Caused possession predicates also allow the same meanings, as shown in (7). (7)
a. John gave his wife a daughter. b. John gave his wife a car. c. John gave his wife the car (for the weekend). d. John gave his wife the windows (to clean).
(inalienable possession) (alienable possession) (control possession) (focus possession)
Given the general correspondence of meanings of have and meanings of give, here and below I assume that the underlying notion of possession relevant for caused possession predicates is the semantics of have (though this is not to say that all caused possession predicates allow all of these meanings; some may encode only a subset). However, there may well be other types of possession than these four, and some of those in (7) may have distinct subtypes. One subtype that is relevant below is physical alienable possession, i.e. alienable possession that involves physically possessing. However, I will by and large not distinguish the different meanings unless necessary. The larger question is how we can tell that having is encoded in IO variants, but not necessarily in to variants. Following Green (1974, 103-104) (see also Oehrle 1976), we can see this in cases where the goal/recipient is an inanimate such as London and is thus inherently incapable of (some kinds of) possession (cf. #London has the letter). In this case an IO variant is infelicitous unless the recipient is reinterpreted as able to possess, e.g. London is reinterpreted as “The London Office”, as shown in (8a). In (8b) either a goal-of-motion reading or a “London Office” reading is possible. 4 I focus here primarily on non-idiomatic meanings of caused possession predicates, though I assume that idiomatic meanings are generally derived from the non-idiomatic meanings. Thus data from idioms can be relevant for determining what the meaning is, but I do not in turn try to characterize those meanings.
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(8)
a. #John mailed London a letter.
(OK only on “London office” reading)
b. John mailed a letter to London.
(London is a goal or “London office”)
Corroborating evidence for possession with IOs comes from idioms that occur in the to-variant as in (9a) but do not involve possession (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2008, 152, (56)). Crucially, although these verbs normally alternate, they are all infelicitous on the idiomatic meaning in the IO variant as in (9b). (9)
a. send x to the showers, take x to the cleaners, send x to the devil, throw x to the wolves, push x to the edge, carry x to extremes b. #send the showers x, #send the cleaners x, #send the devil x, #throw the wolves x, #push the edge x, #carry the extremes x
This is as expected if IO variants are specified for possession, since this would be incompatible with the non-possessional idiomatic meaning. However, the nature of the possession entailment is not entirely straightforward. For most verbs in (4) and (5) actual possession need not obtain, as illustrated in (10). (10) John sent/threw Mary the ball, but the heavy rain stopped her from getting it. Conversely, some caused possession predicates do require actual possession in the IO frame, including those headed by verbs of giving in (4a), such as give, hand, and pass (the salt) (but not pass (the ball)): (11) #John gave/handed Mary the salt, but he dropped it before she got it. Thus there is lexical variation in whether actual possession is encoded. However, the ability to possess is a requirement for all caused possession predicates with IOs. I thus label this meaning component prospective possession (following Gropen et al. 1989, 207), and assume it is the one key piece of meaning shared by all IO variants.
2.2 Oblique Variants The flip-side is what is encoded by the to variant. Pesetsky (1995, 141) argues that to variants describe a superset of the events described by IO variants. Thus anything that can be an IO can be a to PP, but not conversely. This explains the “London Office” facts in (8): the IO requires prospective possession, while to allows but usually does
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not require it.5 However, some to variants do require this reading, e.g. verbs of giving, fulfilling, and future having show the “London Office” effect even in the to variant:6 (12)
a. #John gave/bequeathed/credited the money to London. b. #John gave/bequeathed/credited London the money.
When (prospective) possession is not required, the reading is caused motion, which I take to subsume physical and electronic change-of-location. Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008, 137,143) give as evidence for a motion reading the fact that these verbs allow where in addition to who(m) questions: (13)
a. Where/to whom did John send the book? b. Where/to whom did John throw the ball? c. Where/to whom did John bring the car? d. Where/to whom did John carry the book? e. Where/to whom did you email the invitation?
This is not possible with verbs of giving, fulfilling, and future having: (14) To whom/#where did John give/bequeath/credit the money? Furthermore, the verbs in (14) do not allow directional prepositions other than to, unlike (13) (Pesetsky 1995, 139-140; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2008, 138): (15)
a. #John gave/bequeathed/credited the money onto/into/at the charity. b. John sent a care package into the DMZ. c. John threw the ball at/into his neighbor’s backyard. d. John brought the car into/in front of the garage. e. John carried his books into/up to the classroom under his arm. f. John emailed the latest revisions onto Google’s servers.
However, just as possession is usually only prospective, for verbs that allow motion arrival need not necessarily occur, either: 5 Harley (2005, 41-42) has argued that to variants do not describe a superset of the events of the IO variants. Her evidence comes from data of caused possession verbs (mostly light verbs or those with slightly more idiomatic meaning) where an IO is possible but to is not, e.g. Mary gave John a kick but not *Mary gave a kick to John (her judgments). However, as Harley herself admits (p.45) for at least some such cases the to variant is possible if the goal/recipient is heavy, and indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of all her data in to-variants when other factors favor it, as discussed by Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008, 150-160) and Beavers and Nishida (2009, 9-10). Thus even if there are tendencies to encode some meanings in IO variants, to is never categorically ruled out, suggesting that it can encode everything an IO can, plus more. This in turn supports the analysis of Beavers (2006, 184-199), who proposes more generally that in alternations between direct and oblique arguments the truth conditions associated with the direct argument are a superset of those associated with the corresponding oblique, capturing Pesetsky’s generalization. 6 Verbs requiring (prospective) possession in both variants therefore show no truth-conditional effect of the alternation. It is instead conditioned by factors such as animacy, topicality, grammatical weight, etc. (see Erteschik-Shir 1979; Arnold et al. 2000; Wasow 2002; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2008; Bresnan and Nikitina to appear).
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(16) [ Where Kim and Sandy are playing ball on a very windy day. ] Kim threw/tossed the ball to Sandy, but the wind blew it into the bushes. Further evidence for this comes from the fact that in contexts where arrival is impossible, the to variants are infelicitous (the correlate of the “London Office” effect): (17) [ Where Kim and Sandy are separated by an unbreakable wall of glass. ] #Kim threw/tossed the ball to Sandy. Thus the complement of to is usually a prospective goal, not necessarily an actual goal. Nonetheless, just as there are some verbs like give that require possession, some verbs in to variants require arrival, as with carry, take, and bring: (18) #John carried/brought the dossier to the security council, but neither arrived. Of these verbs, only bring/take allow an IO. In the IO variant, arrival is still encoded as in (19a), but possession is nonetheless prospective as in (19b,c): (19)
a. #John brought the security council the dossier, but neither arrived. b. John brought the security council the dossier, but never let them have it. c. #John brought London the dossier. (OK only on “London office” reading)
Thus to variants always allow (prospective) possessors, but sometimes also (prospective) goals, where the prospective/non-prospective factor varies verb-by-verb.
2.3 Summary Caused possession predicates are associated with two kinds of results — caused possession and caused motion — but in some cases these results are only prospective. Furthermore, which predicates encode which results in which variants (and which are prospective) varies from verb to verb. As noted in §1, a widely accepted analysis is that caused possession predicates are associated with one or two different event structures that predict the appropriate semantics. Following Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008, 135), the prospective nature of the results can be accommodated by assuming a sublexical modality (Koenig and Davis 2001) that varies independently, giving rise to the four possible event structures in (20) (given in the style of notation of Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998). I represent the modality with a ♦, to convey that the event must occur in some possible world, albeit not necessarily the real world.7 (20)
a. [ x CAUSE [ y HAVE z ] ]
c. [ x CAUSE ♦[ y HAVE z ] ]
b. [ x CAUSE [ z GO TO y ] ]
d. [ x CAUSE ♦[ z GO TO y ] ]
7 To be more precise, Koenig and Davis (2001, 86-89) give as the relevant sublexical modality for most ditransitives encoding prospective possession the irrealis “energetic modal”, whose modal base — the set of worlds for which the proposition embedded under the modal is evaluated (Kratzer 1981) — is the set of all worlds in which the intended goals are achieved. The details of the specific sublexical modality are irrelevant here; all that matters is that we can identify and demarcate the relevant prospective component of the meaning of each predicate.
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The event structure associated with each variant of any verb is lexically determined.8 However, several questions still remain. First, the number of event types in (20) is fewer than the number of Pinker classes. What distinguishes these classes exactly? Second, since for many predicates the caused event is prospective, what actually must obtain for each predicate? Third, what aspects of event structure figure into determining which verbs will or will not participate in the dative alternation? Fourth and finally, to what degree are caused possession predicates unique, and to what degree can they be reduced to previously existing classes? In particular, are the event structures in (20) really composed of subevental primitives distinct from those in the [ x CAUSE [ y BECOME α ] ] event structures usually assumed for causative change-of-state predicates? I begin with this final question first, and outline a model of change-of-state and directed motion based on lexical aspectual properties of (in)transitive predicates. I then extend this model to caused possession predicates, based again on aspectual evidence. I ultimately use this model to return to the other three questions outlined here.
3 Theoretical Background - A Scalar Analysis of Change Predicates 3.1 Change as a Figure/Path Relation I show that caused possession (and the type of caused motion found with caused possession predicates) is simply a type of affectedness relation, defined by Beavers (2006, to appear) as a relationship between an event, a theme that (potentially) undergoes a change, and a scale (an ordered set of degrees of holding some property) that measures the change undergone by the theme (Hay et al. 1999; Kennedy and McNally 2005; Kennedy and Levin 2008). A key feature of this approach is that it provides a unified analysis to many types of changes, including those typically assumed to involve caused event types normally labeled as BECOME (change-of-state) and GO TO (change-of-location) in the decompositional literature that are presumed to underlie (in)transitive predicates of change. By subsuming caused HAVE events under this approach we bring ditransitives into this picture as well. Much of the argument for this analysis has to do with the aspectual properties of ditransitives. As noted in §1, aspectual classification has been important for understanding the meanings of (in)transitive predicates, and as I show it is fruitful to apply these techniques to ditransitives as well, to isolate what is the same and what is different in the meaning of different predicate types. I begin by sketching an analysis of caused motion on this approach, recapping Beavers (2009b, to appear) since some to variants of caused possession predicates have a motion reading. Consider first a caused motion predicate such as John rolled the ball down to the bottom of the hill. Here the moving figure is the ball, and the path is the series of 8 An alternative approach would be to say that “prospective” results are conventional implicatures/presuppositions (evidence for this comes from the fact that they survive negation, cf. #I did not throw London the ball). I stick with the sublexical modality approach here since it relies on just one ontological type of meaning, and I sometimes draw on the truth conditional nature of prospective meanings. However, everything I say could be recast in other terms without losing any essential details.
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locations traversed by the ball, starting from the top of the hill down to the bottom. Both of these entities are necessary components in any motion event — there can be no motion without something moving and something it traverses — and each can be identified linguistically by various properties. Syntactically, the theme of a caused motion predicate is typically realized as direct object, while the various components of the path (goal, source, route) are realized as obliques.9 Semantically, Beavers (to appear) notes that moving figures but not parts of paths pass the affectedness test What happened to X is Y test of Cruse (1973, 13) (see also Lakoff 1976, 47-48, Jackendoff 1990, 125-130, Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001, 786-787). (21)
a. What happened to ball is John rolled it down to the bottom of the hill. b. #What happened to the hill is John rolled the ball down to the bottom of it.
Third, as Beavers (2009b) discusses extensively, both the theme and the path figure into computing telicity (as determined by in/for modifiers; Dowty 1979, 56-58). For a motion predicate to be telic the theme must be expressed by a DP with quantized reference (e.g. a definite, specific DP), and the path must be expressed by a bounded path expression, as in (22a). Otherwise, the predicate is atelic, as in (22b,c) with a DP with non-quantized reference or an unbounded path expression respectively. (22)
a. John rolled the ball down to the bottom of the hill in/?for 20 minutes. b. John rolled balls down to the bottom of the hill for/??in 20 minutes. c. John rolled the ball (further down the hill) for/??in 20 minutes.
I summarize these properties of caused motion predicates as follows: (23) Argument Realization Figures into telicity What happened to X is Y
theme Object X X
path Oblique X ×
Beavers (2009b, to appear) analyzes (23) building on the mereological event semantic model of motion and property change of Krifka (1998, 222-230). On this model, entities fall into domains of objects UP , events UE , and connected, directed paths/scales UH , and form mereological part/whole structures. For any x, x′ ∈ UX , x′ may be a subpart of x (x′
