Generalized Transformations and Restructuring in ... - CiteSeerX

Generalized Transformations and Restructuring in Romance Seth Kulick, University of Pennsylvania “Restructuring” in Romance refers to constructions which appear to violate standard locality constraints, thereby presenting a challenge for syntactic theory. In this paper I discuss how restructuring constructions can be handled in the framework of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), a system of generalized transformations used to compose phrase structure. There is no inter-clausal movement in TAG, since all such apparent movement is instead the result of local movement, with the adjoining operation used to separate components of a tree. As a consequence, some analyses for restructuring proposed in other analyses, such as cyclic head movement for clitic climbing, cannot be stated in TAG. Also, an attractive property of TAG is that the nature of the formalism itself does a large part of the job of the enforcement of locality constraints, such as subjacency. It therefore becomes an interesting question as to how an analysis of these restructuring non-local dependencies can be handled within TAG. The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 1 discusses the data on restructuring in Romance, section 2 gives an overview of TAG, section 3 discusses a TAG analysis of restructuring, and section 4 contains some concluding remarks.

1. Restructuring in Romance One of the most well-studied cases of restructuring 1 is that of clitic climbing. As shown in the Italian sentence (1), clitic attachment is usually a local process, with the clitic only attaching to the verb of which it is an argument, and not to a higher verb. However, with a limited class of verbs, it can optionally climb to attach to the higher verb, as in (2). I will follow Aissen and Perlmutter (1983) in referring to these verbs, such as volere, as the “trigger” verbs. (1)

a. b.

(2)

a. b.

Mario odia leggerlo * Mario lo odia leggere ‘Mario hates to read it’ Mario vuole leggerlo Mario lo vuole leggere ‘Mario wants to read it’

The clitic can move past a series of verbs, as long as those verbs are all trigger verbs, as in (3): (3)

Mario lo vuole poter leggere Mario it wants to be able to read ‘Mario wants to be able to read it’

The “middle si” construction, in which the object appears in the subject position, is usually clausal bound, as shown in (4a) for the non-trigger verb odiare. However, the object of the lower verb can appear as the subject of a higher trigger verb, as in (4b): (4)

a.

b.

* Questi libri si odiavano proprio leggere these books si hated really to read ‘We really hated to read these books’ Questi libri si volevano proprio leggere these books si wanted really to read ‘We really wanted to read these books’

The range of trigger verbs is extremely limited. There is a core group which is generally acceptable for all speakers of Italian, Spanish, and Catalan, that consists of: (examples are in Italian)

 Modals: e.g., dovere (must), potere (can)  Aspectuals: e.g., cominciare (begin), continuare (continue)  Motion Verbs: e.g., andare (go), venire (come) One additional verb that belongs to this list is volere (want), which is variously described as a subject-control verb (Moore 1991 for Spanish) or as “semi-modal” or “modal” (Rizzi 1982 for Italian). Beyond this limited class of verbs are others for which there is a great deal of disagreement, between speakers, and even by the same speakers (e.g., see Napoli 1981 for Italian and Su˜ner 1980 for Spanish). One particularly interesting case is that of “try”. There is disagreement among Italian speakers regarding clitic climbing with a verb like cercare (try) (Napoli 1981). In Spanish, however, tratar de seems widely accepted as a trigger verb (Su n˜ er 1980, Moore 1991): (5)

Lo trat´e de arreglar ‘I tried to fix it’

There are two other major classes of verbs in Romance that allow clitic climbing - the causatives, and object control verbs in Spanish such as permitir. I am not discussing these verbs in this paper, except in passing.

2. Tree Adjoining Grammar The fundamental idea of TAG as a grammatical formalism is that the specification of grammatical constraints can be separated from the recursive processes in the grammar. This is accomplished by localizing the grammatical constraints within small pieces of phrase structure, called elementary trees, which are combined using the adjoining operation2. Adjoining inserts one elementary tree inside the body of another, as shown in Figure 1. Trees which can be adjoined into another tree are auxiliary trees, and

X X

Y Y

Y Y Y

(A)

(B) (C)

Figure 1: Adjoining in TAG have a foot node along the frontier which is of the same category as the root node. Adjoining is what allows recursive structures to be separated from the specification of the grammar, as will be illustrated below; recursive structures are treated as auxiliary trees, which adjoin in to produce non-local dependencies. The adjoining operation pushes TAG beyond context-free power into the class of “mildly contextsensitive” grammar formalisms (Joshi et al. 1990). TAG is a formal system that combines the elementary trees, but it is not a linguistic theory and imposes no constraints upon the nature of these elementary trees. However, it does enforce a particular working hypothesis for all linguistic work in TAG, namely that the substantive theory of syntax must be stated over the bounded local domains of the elementary trees. I follow here the characterization of the elementary trees proposed by Frank (1992), in which the crucial point is that all semantic arguments associated with a verb are located in the same elementary tree as that verb. (6)

Condition on Elementary Tree Minimality (CETM): Every elementary tree consists of the extended projection of a single lexical head

One example of the use of adjoining for recursive processes is given by the TAG analysis in Kroch and Joshi (1985) and Frank (1992) of a sentence with a raising verb, as in (7). (7) (8) (a)

Bob seems to like pizza

 H HI’ DP HHVP Bob I HH  to t V’HH  V DP IP

i

i

like

(b)

I’HH  I VPHH  V I’ seems

pizza

The tree for like, in (8a), is the projection of like. The tree for seems, in (8b), however, lacks a position for the matrix subject, either [Spec,VP], or [Spec,IP], since seems does not select for a subject. The recursive structure of auxiliary trees, together with the lack of a [Spec, IP] position, requires that seems takes an I’

complement in (8b). The seems tree (8b) adjoins at the I’ node of the like tree (8a) to form (9): IP  HHH   DP I’    HHHVP Bob I HHHI’ V HHVP seems I HHV’ to t HHDP V

(9)

i

i

like

pizza

A distinctive feature of the TAG analysis is that there is no “movement” from one clause to another. All movement is internal to an elementary tree, and the appearance of inter-clausal movement results by segments of a tree getting stretched away from the rest of the tree, as illustrated by the Bob segment of (8a) being stretched away from the rest of (8a) in (9). The analysis of wh-movement is similar. To derive What did John think that Bill saw?, an auxiliary tree for did John think adjoins into the initial tree for Whati that Bill saw ti , thus stretching what away from that Bill saw. The difference between A’ and A-movement results from the position of the moved element and the locus of adjoining. Space prohibits discussion here, but it should be noted that a certain notion of locality is enforced by the nature of the formal system, together with a reasonable characterization of elementary trees. For example, Frank and Kroch (1995) illustrate how a super-raising case like Bob seems it is certain to like pizza cannot be derived, and the explicit statement of the principle of subjacency is unnecessary.

3. TAG and Restructuring Now consider how TAG can handle a sentences such as (10ab). I will assume that the clitic is syntactically represented in the phrase structure. and of course, following the CETM, the clitic must be in the same elementary tree as the verb of which it is a dependent argument. (10)

a.

b.

Mario lo vuole leggere Mario it wants to read ‘Mario wants to read it’ Mario lo vuole poter leggere Mario it wants to be able to read ‘Mario wants to be able to read it’

Maria vuole

poter

leggere lo

Figure 2: Cyclic head movement - What TAG can’t do (11)

HHHH  Mario AgrS’ HHH   AgrS ClP

(a)

AgrSP

(b)

T’   HHVP T

j

vuolej

Cl’  HHH   Cl TP loi

H V T’ V’

tj

T’  HHH   T VPHH  t V’ leggere  H V NP k

j

i

tk

Given these assumptions, what TAG is unable to do is to treat the clitic as a case of cyclic movement, such as in Kayne (1989), and roughly illustrated in Figure 2. This is impossible for TAG because there is no inter-clausal “movement”. The TAG analysis requires that the clitic lo be stretched away from leggere, and in order to have such a TAG analysis, we need to assume that Mari does not originate as the subject of vuole, but rather as the subject of leggere, with vuole adjoining in. In effect, this means that the trigger verb vuole, and indeed all the trigger verbs, are treated syntactically as raising verbs, at least when clitic climbing takes place. If they are treated as raising verbs that adjoin in, then the clitic can still be moved internally to an elementary tree, and just “stretched” away from the verb that it’s semantically related to. To illustrate, I will use a more articulated, split-INFL phrase structure, in contrast to the earlier examples, and I will assume a Clitic Projection, ClP. The elementary tree for leggere is shown in (11a), and the tree for vuole in (11b). The adjoining of the latter into the former results in the tree in Figure 3, for the clitic climbing case of (10a).

AgrSP HHH   Mario AgrS’ HHH   AgrS ClP j

Cl’HH  Cl TP    HHHT’ lo HHH  T VP i

vuolel

V’  HHH   V TP tl

T’    HHHVP T t t PNPP leggere k

j

k

i

Figure 3: Clitic movement by adjoining There is a contrast here with other analyses of trigger verbs that treat these verbs as taking “defective” complements, usually assumed to be just VP, with the restructuring properties taken to follow from the lack of an embedded Infl. The TAG analysis is the reverse, since here the complement infinitival is the full projection, with the matrix verb being “defective”, heading a tree that adjoins in. The long si-passive case (12) is handled in a similar way, with questi libri in the same tree as leggere. si is treated as a “passivizer”, thus forming a tree for questi libri si leggere, with volevano adjoining in. (12)

Questi libri si volevano proprio leggere these books si wanted really to read ‘We really wanted to read these books’

The case of unbounded movement, as in (10b), is similar to the derivation of (10a), except that the tree for vuole (11b) first adjoins at the root node of a T’ tree for poter (13a), to form the derived auxiliary tree in (13b), which can then adjoin into (11a)3. Once again, there is no cyclic movement from one tree to another, but rather repeated adjoinings. 3.1. The Trigger Verbs as Raising Verbs The TAG analysis in essence makes the claim that the trigger verbs can act as raising verbs, and so allow clitic climbing (for another view on TAG and clitic climbing, see

(13)

(a)

T’   HHVP T poterl

V’

H V T’ tl

(b)

T’   HHH  T VP vuolej

V’  HHH   V T’   HHVP t T j

poterl

V’

HT’

V tl

Bleam 1994). They can act as raising verbs either because they simply are raising verbs, or else they are adjunct predicates that assign an implicit theta-role which is not reflected in the syntax, an idea originally suggested by Zubizarreta (1982). There is a good deal of evidence that such an approach is appropriate, based both on the general semantic characteristics of the trigger verbs, and specific tests arguing against a standard PRO-control structure. A certain number of trigger verbs are clearly raising verbs, such as the epistemic modals. Similarly, it is uncontroversial that aspectual verbs can act as raising verbs, as argued by Picallo (1985) for Catalan and Luj a´ n (1980) and Moore (1991) for Spanish4. Also, as pointed out for Spanish by Strozer (1981) and for Catalan by Picallo (1985), the motion verbs are ambiguous between a true motion reading and an aspectual reading if clitic climbing has not occurred, but are unambiguously aspectual if clitic climbing has occurred5: (14)

a.

b.

He tornat a felicitar-la ‘(I) have come back to congratulate her’ or ‘(I) have congratulated her again’ L’he tornat a felicitar ‘(I) have come back to congratulate her’ ‘(I) have congratulated her again’

It is thus quite reasonable, and even necessary, to assume that the the motion verbs, aspectuals, and epistemic modals have raising subcategorizations which can be active when clitic climbing occurs. Therefore, the real potential problem for the TAG analysis concerns verbs which might be thought of as non-raising, subjectcontrol verbs, particularly the root modals, and want. Consider first the root modals. It is problematic to treat them as subjectcontrol verbs, because the root modality is not always applied to the syntactic subject, as has been known since at least Newmeyer (1975). For example, in (15ab) the obligation is clearly not on an opening hand or tabs, and a root modal can

even take an expletive subject, as illustrated by the Spanish example in (15c) from Moore (1991). (15)

a. b. c.

An opening hand must contain thirteen points (Newmeyer 1975) Tabs should be kept on Mr. Weberman Despu´es de aquella borrachera que cogieron los estudiantes, ya no puede haber alcoh´ol en los dormitorios ‘Since that bender the students went on, there can no longer be alcohol in the dormitories’.

There is of course a large literature on this topic, and I will say no more here except that it is quite reasonable to treat the root modals as raising verbs which have an implicit theta-role which can, but doesn’t have to be, applied to the syntactic subject6 . Finally, this leaves the limited number of apparent subject-control verbs, such as “want” and “try”, as potential problems for the TAG analysis. These verbs seem most problematic, at first, since they clearly aren’t raising verbs in the traditional sense, and so some analyses, such as Moore (1991), have treated them as fundamentally different than the root modals. However, the line between root modals and the subject control trigger verbs is not so clear-cut as sometimes stated. For example, while Moore (1991) argues that root modals must be treated as raising verbs, given sentences such as (15c), he rejects that analysis for querer (want) and tratar de (try), given their apparent control properties. However, it is not the case that all root modals have apparent raising verb characteristics. As pointed out by Zubizarreta (1982), ability can behaves differently than the other root modals, such as the permission can in Moore’s example, in that it does not appear to have the properties of a raising verb. A possible conclusion would be that ability can should be grouped together with the subject-control verbs, and not the other root modals. However, an alternative to this, of course, is to group the very limited set of subject-control trigger verbs together with the root modals, and assume that whatever prevents the assigning of the modal force to something besides the syntactic subject for ability can also prevents it in the case of want and try. That this is the right move to make is suggested by the great deal of evidence that “want”, at least, in Romance, cannot be limited to a subject-control analysis. Space prohibits full discussion here, so I will mention just one argument, that of Gonz´alez (1991), for data from Chilean Spanish. See Picallo (1985) and Boskovic (1994) for other examples. (16)

a. b. c. d.

Marta le gusta a Juan ‘Juan likes Marta’ A Juan le gusta Marta ‘Juan likes Marta’ A Juan le quiere gustar Marta ‘Juan wants to like Marta’ * A Juan le quiere comer la torta ‘Juan wants to eat the cake’

(16ab) show the usual pattern for psych verbs, with the a marker as the marker of inherent case bearing the experiencer theta-role. Now, the interesting fact is that the a can appear on the subject position of querer, if the lower verb is gustar (16c), although the subject position of querer cannot otherwise have a (16d). Gonz´alez (1991) discusses this in terms of matrix “inversion”, and Boskovic (1994) argues that a sentence like (16c) is good evidence against a control analysis7 The evidence for “try” is less conclusive 8 , although the semantic facts from Napoli (1981) noted below are suggestive, and it should be kept in mind that it’s a more marginal case than other trigger verbs, at least for Italian. I suggest that try can act as an adjunct predicate because it is in some way redundant to the meaning of the verb, which has a sense of “trying” built into it. It’s worth noting that try is cross-linguistically a very exceptional verb. For example, Kornfilt (1996) writes that there are just three verbs in Turkish which can participate in the “Infinitival Double Passive”: “want”, “try”, and “begin”. Meyerhoff (1997) reports that in Bislama, the creole spoken in Vanuatu (Melanesia), the verbs for “want”, “try”, “start”, “go”, and “come” are the only verbs other than the semantically bleached “full” auxiliaries that can take a bare infinitive. While of course none of this shows that it is correct to treat “try” as an adjunct predicate for the TAG analysis, it does strongly suggest that it would be the wrong move to forgo an analysis because of the apparent exceptionality of the verbs for “try”. I suggest that it’s therefore reasonable to treat tratar as an adjunct predicate, a syntactic raising verb. Also of importance here is the study by Napoli (1981) of trigger verbs in Italian, in which she argued that they behave semantically like auxiliaries when clitic climbing occurs, although not necessarily so when it doesn’t occur. I cannot review the relevant data here, but of particular interest is the claim that verbs such as volere (want) and cercare (try) are more acceptable for clitic climbing when they function more as a “comment upon the state or action of its complement”, rather than being themselves the focus of attention. The TAG analysis claims that Napoli (1981)’s arguments concerning the more auxiliary-like readings of the trigger verbs when clitic climbing takes place correlate with their adjoining in like raising verbs. 3.2. Object-Control Trigger Verbs One nice aspect of the TAG analysis is that it rules out object-control verbs as trigger verbs. Since the subject of the final sentence is simply the subject of the elementary tree projected from the lower verb, it is formally impossible for the final subject of the sentence to be anything but the subject of the lower verb. Analyses like those of Kayne (1989) cannot derive this conclusion without additional stipulations, such that trigger verbs are those compatible with I-C-I movement, and that I-C-I movement in object control structures would “coindex two AGR whose respective subjects are themselves not essentially coindexed” and that this is “the source of incompatibility”. For TAG, this restriction on coindexed subjects of course follows immediately, since it’s just one subject. Similarly, Burzio (1986)’s condition of “subject substitution”, requiring that the matrix and lower subjects be coindexed in

these “restructuring” cases, follows immediately. One potential problem here is that there are indeed some cases of objectcontrol verbs that allows clitic climbing, such as the permitir class in Spanish: (17)

a. b.

Juan le permiti´o arreglarla (a Pedro) ‘Juan allowed Pedro to repair it’ Juan se la permiti´o arreglar (a Pedro)

Another case of clitic climbing that can’t be handled by the analysis given is, of course, that of the Romance causatives. A TAG analysis of clitic climbing with the permitir verbs and the Romance causatives is way beyond the scope of this paper, but what’s important to note is that the TAG analysis enforces a different analysis of two cases. It has long been a matter of debate in the literature as to whether all these cases should be handled in the same manner. However, even the analyses which try to handle them all with the same means use additional constraints to distinguish between the two cases in some crucial respects (e.g, Burzio (1986)’s VP-movement account, but with “subject substitution” to distinguish between the two cases). Also, crucially for TAG, clitic climbing with the object-control and causative constructions does not appear to be unbounded as with the cases discussed in this paper, although I cannot discuss that here. 3.3. Optionality and Verb-Clitic Order I have not yet discussed the optionality of clitic climbing or long NP movement with the trigger verbs. For verbs such as want and try, it’s reasonable to assume that they also have their usual subcategorization as full subject-control verbs, taking a CP complement. A derivation with such a tree would be the derivation without clitic climbing. The case of raising verbs that are trigger verbs is quite different, because, under the TAG analysis of raising verbs, such verbs must always adjoin into tree for the “lower” clause. If that is the case, how can it sometimes get the clitic, and sometimes not? I propose that the trigger verbs which are always raising verbs, can, in a split-INFL structure, act as either AgrS’ or T’ auxiliary trees, and when they adjoin at AgrS’, they do not get the clitic, since they are “above” it in the final tree. A similar problem arises for any raising verbs which are not trigger verbs at all. They must adjoin in as AgrS’ and not T’ auxiliary trees. Finally, I have not discussed the case of a clitic climbing to a non-finite verb, in which case it appears after the verb, since clitics appear after nonfinite verbs in Spanish and Italian. The problem is that if a nonfinite trigger verb also adjoins in as a T’ tree, then it will be after the clitic in the derived tree. Although there are several ways to deal with this question (e.g., using a somewhat different phrase structure so that a nonfinite trigger verb can adjoin above the clitic), for now I assume that a morphological component attaches the clitic to the verb immediately below it in the final derived tree, before or after the verb, depending on its finiteness. If no verb adjoins in, then it will be the infinitival verb. If a (finite or nonfinite) trigger verb adjoins in, it will be the trigger verb.

4. Conclusion I have discussed an analysis of restructuring in Romance within a TAG framework. An analysis in terms of inter-clausal “movement” is impossible in TAG, due to the nature of the formalism. The analysis proposed treats the trigger verbs as adjunct predicates, which are syntactically like raising verbs. This has been argued to have a number of advantages: (1) the possibility for the trigger verbs to adjoin in correlates with their semantic “weakness”, (2) a sharp distinction is made between cliticclimbing with these verbs and with object-control verbs and causatives, without the need for any additional stipulations, and (3) the various facts showing that the main predicate in these constructions is the embedded verb follow directly from the analysis. There are of course many aspects of “restructuring” that have not been discussed here, such as auxiliary change in Italian and long tough movement, and these are left for future research.

Endnotes * I would like to thank Tonia Bleam, David Embick, Robert Frank, Heidi Harley, Aravind Joshi, Brian Kinstler, Anthony Kroch, Jeff Lidz, Miriam Meyerhoff, and the members of the Xtag project for valuable conversation and advice. I would also like to thank Filippo Beghelli, Zoe Lacroix, Marisel, Paolo Merlo, Carmen RioRey, and Giorgio Satta for their native speaker judgements, and Alexis Dimitriadis for help with Latex formatting problems. This work was supported by NSF grant SBR8920230 and ARO grant DAAH04-94-G-0426. 1 I am using “restructuring” as a descriptive term only, and not to refer to the particular analysis proposed in Rizzi (1982). 2 There is another operation, substitution, usually described as part of TAG. This is not necessary for the current analysis, and so will not be discussed. 3 Adjoining at the root of an another tree is a subcase of the general adjoining operation, which results in an operation similar to substitution. For details of how it is different than substitution, see Frank (1992). 4 Although they might have a control reading as well. The situation for Italian seems to be more complex - see Picallo (1985:p. 272, n. 15). 5 Again, the situation is more complex for Italian, although I think that the analysis can be maintained. 6 While this leaves open the problem of how the modal force is applied, the crucial point is that the root modals can be treated as raising verbs syntactically. 7 Boskovic (1994) reaches a different conclusion than I do regarding the analysis of the root modals and trigger verbs, although I cannot discuss his analysis here. 8 Although Gonz´alez (1991) also provides the following data, showing that the same pattern is possible for tratar de. It seems a bit more iffy, though, although the very possibility is somewhat suggestive. (18)

A Marta le trataron de gustar los gatos, pero le produjeron alergia ‘Marta tried to like cats, but they produced allergy on her’

References Aissen, and Perlmutter (1983) “Clause Reduction in Spanish,” in Studies in Relational Grammar, University of Chicago Press. Bleam, T. (1994) “Clitic Climbing and The Power of Tree Adjoining Grammar,” in Symposium on Tree Adjoining Grammar. To Appear. Boskovic, Z. (1994) “D-Structure, Theta-Criterion, and Movement into ThetaPositions,” Linguistic Analysis 24, 3–4. Burzio (1986) Italian Syntax, D. Reidel. Frank, R. (1992) Syntactic Locality and Tree Adjoining Grammar: Grammatical, Acquisition and Processing Perpectives, Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Frank, R., and A. Kroch (1995) “Generalized Transformations and the Theory of Grammar,” Studia Linguistica 49, 103–151. Gonz´alez, N. (1991) Object and Raising in Spanish, Garland Publishing. Joshi, A. K., K. Vijay-Shanker, and D. Weir (1990) “The Convergence of Mildly Context Sensitive Grammatical Formalisms,” in P. Sells, S. Shieber, and T. Wascow, eds., Foundational Issues in Natural Language Parsing, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kayne, R. S. (1989) “Null Subjects and Clitic Climbing,” in O. Jaeggli and K. J. Safir, eds., The Null Subject Parameter, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 239–261. Kornfilt, J. (1996) “NP-Movement and Restructuring,” in R. Freidin, ed., Current Issues in Comparative Grammar, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 121–147. Kroch, A., and A. K. Joshi (1985) “The Linguistic Relevance of Tree Adjoining Grammars,” Technical Report MS-CIS-85-16, University of Pennsylvania. Luj´an, M. (1980) “Clitic Promotion and Mood in Spanish Verbal Complements,” Linguistics 18, 381–484. Meyerhoff, M. (1997) Be i no gat: Constraints on Null Subjects in Bislama, Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Moore, J. (1991) Reduced Constructions in Spanish, Doctoral dissertation, University of Santa Cruz. Napoli, D. J. (1981) “Semantic interpretation vs. lexical governance,” Language 57, 841–887. Newmeyer, F. (1975) English Aspectual Verbs, Mouton. Picallo, M. C. (1985) Opaque Domains, Doctoral dissertation, CUNY. Rizzi (1982) Issues in Italian Syntax, Foris Publications. Strozer, J. (1981) “An Alternative to Restructuring in Romance Syntax,” in H. Contreras and J. Klausenburger, eds., Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Symposium on Romance Languages, Seattle, University of Washington. Su˜ner, M. (1980) “Clitic Promotion in Spanish Revisited,” in F. Nuessel, ed., Contemporary Studies in Romance Languages, Bloomington, Indiana University Linguistics Club. Zubizarreta, M. (1982) On the relationship of the lexicon to syntax, Doctoral dissertation, MIT.