Syntax random
Re: Syntax random
I'm asking the same question here as I do on Bradrn's ergativity thread, at his suggestion. It comes out of his description of syntactic ergativity and while I think I understand how A-bar movement works with relative clauses, I'm less clear as to how it works with wh-questioning and how that works with syntactic ergativity.
So...if A-bar movement involves (well) movement then "John kicked the cat".... "Who kicked the cat?" involves no movement; the subject of both English sentences is in the same place (SVO word order). It is only with "What did John kick?" that there is movement (it's now object first), so I'm guessing that this means subjects aren't extracted in English, or am I nor understanding extraction in this context?
Pretending English is ergative for a second, in a language with AVO word order replacing John-erg with who-erg involves no movement either. It is only "What-abs did John kick?" that involves movement. Are we treating ergative and absolutive demonstrably differently here? Is that absolutive extraction only and therefore an example of syntactic ergativity? I'm leaving be the fact that in a sentence like John-abs weeps... who is weeping? There's no movement either...
Enlightenment anyone?
So...if A-bar movement involves (well) movement then "John kicked the cat".... "Who kicked the cat?" involves no movement; the subject of both English sentences is in the same place (SVO word order). It is only with "What did John kick?" that there is movement (it's now object first), so I'm guessing that this means subjects aren't extracted in English, or am I nor understanding extraction in this context?
Pretending English is ergative for a second, in a language with AVO word order replacing John-erg with who-erg involves no movement either. It is only "What-abs did John kick?" that involves movement. Are we treating ergative and absolutive demonstrably differently here? Is that absolutive extraction only and therefore an example of syntactic ergativity? I'm leaving be the fact that in a sentence like John-abs weeps... who is weeping? There's no movement either...
Enlightenment anyone?
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Re: Syntax random
It does, though, in Chomskyan syntax. "Who" moves from its original location upward to the TP node.
It's hard to explain why in any quick fashion... plus I have to get to the gym... but the superquick idea is that we need a TP node for other reasons, and it produces some useful simplifications to use it for subject extraction. (One being that the movement rule applies to all sentences.)
(That doesn't mean it's a great idea. But I just wanted to point out that in his versions of syntax, you still have movement here.)
Re: Syntax random
Actually, I just remembered one thing I forgot to mention when you first asked this question. In a language with syntactic ergativity, you can’t usually ask questions like *Who-erg kicked the cat-abs? — you can only say What-abs did John-erg kick. Even though it appears that the second sentence here has movement while the first doesn’t, there is still a demonstrable difference between them, since the second is ungrammatical while the first is not.evmdbm wrote: ↑Sun Aug 02, 2020 8:13 am Pretending English is ergative for a second, in a language with AVO word order replacing John-erg with who-erg involves no movement either. It is only "What-abs did John kick?" that involves movement. Are we treating ergative and absolutive demonstrably differently here? Is that absolutive extraction only and therefore an example of syntactic ergativity? I'm leaving be the fact that in a sentence like John-abs weeps... who is weeping? There's no movement either...
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Re: Syntax random
I'll follow up on zompist a bit.
One thing is that if you've got a language in which ergative subjects cannot be questioned or relativised or whatever, that's by itself reason to think that the constructions in question involve movement, even if the movement isn't evident on the surface. Syntactic ergativity usually, and maybe always, involves constraints on constructions that in many language involve A-bar movement (questions, relative clauses...), and those constraints are naturally thought of as constraints on A-bar movement---so wherever they apply, that's a reason to suspect movement.
In English you don't have anything quite like that. In fact I'm not sure that there's any construction-specific reason to think there's movement in English subject questions. So maybe there's no movement in English subject questions. (That's an option available to Chomskyans, by the way, maybe I disagree with zompist about that.)
That's all put in terms of movement, though that might not be essential. And actually I've been wanting to try to formulate some thoughts about movement, so I'll try that out here. Er, it got pretty long, so I've gone and put it between [more] tags.
One thing is that if you've got a language in which ergative subjects cannot be questioned or relativised or whatever, that's by itself reason to think that the constructions in question involve movement, even if the movement isn't evident on the surface. Syntactic ergativity usually, and maybe always, involves constraints on constructions that in many language involve A-bar movement (questions, relative clauses...), and those constraints are naturally thought of as constraints on A-bar movement---so wherever they apply, that's a reason to suspect movement.
In English you don't have anything quite like that. In fact I'm not sure that there's any construction-specific reason to think there's movement in English subject questions. So maybe there's no movement in English subject questions. (That's an option available to Chomskyans, by the way, maybe I disagree with zompist about that.)
That's all put in terms of movement, though that might not be essential. And actually I've been wanting to try to formulate some thoughts about movement, so I'll try that out here. Er, it got pretty long, so I've gone and put it between [more] tags.
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Re: Syntax random
Regarding my question many pages ago about the innovations of Chomskyan syntax, here's a blog post written by Martin Haspelmath about this topic. It may be of particular interest because, as he himself notes, he is a regular critic (I'd add perhaps even a rather harsh one) of Chomskyan syntax (example 1, example 2).
Re: Syntax random
I've been re-readig my copy of the Syntax construction kit, and I'll be the first to admit that syntactic thinking doesn't come naturally to me, but one thing stuck out like a sore thumb.
In the bestiary, there's a short bit about object deletion (p. 302) and the argument is basically "it's hard to explain ambitransitive verbs that are also unergative because it's an object deletion" with the implication that deleting the object of a transitive verb should automatically make the sentence ungrammatical. I do not dispute that conclusion, but I do dispute its premise...
The problem I see with it is that all examples listed are essentially cases of cognate objects (briefly discussed earlier on p. 228), which are more or less semantically empty. It's not a case of fundamentally transitive verbs losing objects: it's a case of fundamentally intransitive verbs that have been given dummy objects. If we construct parallel sentences where the object is not cognate, they cannot easily be deleted anymore (Such sentences are very difficult to construct for bite, probably because there is no sense for that verb where the object is not somewhat cognate):
I am smokingcigarettes → I am smoking
I am smokingsalmon → *I am smoking
I am ridinga horse → I am riding
I am ridinga motorcycle → *I am riding
The goat atemy report → The goat ate
The photocopier atemy report → *The photocopier ate [maybe no ungrammatical in the strictest sense, still highly infelicitous at best]
In the bestiary, there's a short bit about object deletion (p. 302) and the argument is basically "it's hard to explain ambitransitive verbs that are also unergative because it's an object deletion" with the implication that deleting the object of a transitive verb should automatically make the sentence ungrammatical. I do not dispute that conclusion, but I do dispute its premise...
The problem I see with it is that all examples listed are essentially cases of cognate objects (briefly discussed earlier on p. 228), which are more or less semantically empty. It's not a case of fundamentally transitive verbs losing objects: it's a case of fundamentally intransitive verbs that have been given dummy objects. If we construct parallel sentences where the object is not cognate, they cannot easily be deleted anymore (Such sentences are very difficult to construct for bite, probably because there is no sense for that verb where the object is not somewhat cognate):
I am smoking
I am smoking
I am riding
I am riding
The goat ate
The photocopier ate
Re: Syntax random
Um, I’m not sure that ‘cognate object’ means what you think it means. Wikipedia defines it as ‘a verb's object that is etymologically related to the verb’, and that’s always been what I thought it means as well. Examples (again from Wikipedia): ‘He slept a troubled sleep’; ‘He laughed a bitter laugh’. They’re interesting because it’s hard to determine their transitivity: in those examples, ‘slept’ and ‘laughed’ are normally intransitive, but here they’re transitive.
So the examples here…
So the examples here…
…are not cognate objects. In particular, they are not ‘more or less semantically empty … dummy objects’ at all, as you assert. For instance, ‘cigarettes’ in ‘I am smoking cigarettes’ is not semantically empty at all: compare ‘I am smoking cigarettes’, ‘I am smoking cigars’, ‘I am smoking a pipe’. (Or, if you happen to be preparing smoked salmon, ‘I am smoking salmon’, though I appreciate that that’s a different sense of the verb.) What you have observed here is that you can only delete the object when it is semantically expected for that verb — which of course is true. (And, given the appropriate context, all of your supposedly ‘ungrammatical’ sentences can become more grammatical — though still dispreferred — if you make the intended argument expected enough: ‘I haven’t handed in my report because the photocopier ate it. The photocopier ate and ate and eventually spat out some mangled shreds.’ Or, ‘I always ride my motorcycle to work. Today I saw a car accident while I was riding.’)Circeus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 8:21 pm The problem I see with it is that all examples listed are essentially cases of cognate objects (briefly discussed earlier on p. 228), which are more or less semantically empty. It's not a case of fundamentally transitive verbs losing objects: it's a case of fundamentally intransitive verbs that have been given dummy objects. If we construct parallel sentences where the object is not cognate, they cannot easily be deleted anymore (Such sentences are very difficult to construct for bite, probably because there is no sense for that verb where the object is not somewhat cognate):
I am smokingcigarettes→ I am smoking
I am smokingsalmon→ *I am smoking
I am ridinga horse→ I am riding
I am ridinga motorcycle→ *I am riding
The goat atemy report→ The goat ate
The photocopier atemy report→ *The photocopier ate [maybe no ungrammatical in the strictest sense, still highly infelicitous at best]
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Re: Syntax random
Calling to cognate object may have been a mistake. It's easy to dismiss with examples like "dream a dream", it,s harder to dismiss when the examples include things like "heave a sigh" or Zompist's "take a look" and "take a walk" (there's a reason I specifically mention that it's his own examples that draw me to contest the so-called oddity!).bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 8:50 pm…are not cognate objects. In particular, they are not ‘more or less semantically empty … dummy objects’ at all, as you assert. For instance, ‘cigarettes’ in ‘I am smoking cigarettes’ is not semantically empty at all: compare ‘I am smoking cigarettes’, ‘I am smoking cigars’, ‘I am smoking a pipe’. (Or, if you happen to be preparing smoked salmon, ‘I am smoking salmon’, though I appreciate that that’s a different sense of the verb.) What you have observed here is that you can only delete the object when it is semantically expected for that verb — which of course is true.
My meaning is really that here the transitives should be read as derived from the intransitive, not the other way around, hence deletion of the object is not anomalous in any fashion: it's really just a return to a base state.
You can validate a LOT of otherwise ungrammatical statements if you expand beyond the base sentence. I always understood that a major point in Chomskyan syntax (or at least a huge point of disagreement in analysis techniques between it and other approaches) is precisely that you're not supposed to do that.(And, given the appropriate context, all of your supposedly ‘ungrammatical’ sentences can become more grammatical — though still dispreferred — if you make the intended argument expected enough: ‘I haven’t handed in my report because the photocopier ate it. The photocopier ate and ate and eventually spat out some mangled shreds.’ Or, ‘I always ride my motorcycle to work. Today I saw a car accident while I was riding.’)
Worth pointing out also that "motorcycle" is just the more polite example. It's significantly harder to explain away the distinction when you're riding a dildo!
Re: Syntax random
I would call those light verb constructions, rather than cognate object constructions: almost all of the meaning is concentrated in the nominal argument, leaving the ‘light verb’ nearly semantically empty. (As it happens, I’ve been reading heavily about such constructions for the past week or so; I find them really interesting!)Circeus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 9:08 pmCalling to cognate object may have been a mistake. It's easy to dismiss with examples like "dream a dream", it,s harder to dismiss when the examples include things like "heave a sigh" or Zompist's "take a look" and "take a walk" (there's a reason I specifically mention that it's his own examples that draw me to contest the so-called oddity!).bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 8:50 pm…are not cognate objects. In particular, they are not ‘more or less semantically empty … dummy objects’ at all, as you assert. For instance, ‘cigarettes’ in ‘I am smoking cigarettes’ is not semantically empty at all: compare ‘I am smoking cigarettes’, ‘I am smoking cigars’, ‘I am smoking a pipe’. (Or, if you happen to be preparing smoked salmon, ‘I am smoking salmon’, though I appreciate that that’s a different sense of the verb.) What you have observed here is that you can only delete the object when it is semantically expected for that verb — which of course is true.
Interesting interpretation — but is there any difference really between saying that they are originally intransitive verbs which have been made transitive vs originally transitive verbs which are made intransitive?My meaning is really that here the transitives should be read as derived from the intransitive, not the other way around, hence deletion of the object is not anomalous in any fashion: it's really just a return to a base state.
I always thought that a sentence is grammatical if it’s grammatical in any context — otherwise you eliminate of a lot of otherwise fine sentences. (One example that comes to mind is sentences such as You I like; such sentences are very common in spoken and written English, and are perfectly fine given the appropriate context, but by themselves they seem decidedly ungrammatical.)You can validate a LOT of otherwise ungrammatical statements if you expand beyond the base sentence. I always understood that a major point in Chomskyan syntax (or at least a huge point of disagreement in analysis techniques between it and other approaches) is precisely that you're not supposed to do that.(And, given the appropriate context, all of your supposedly ‘ungrammatical’ sentences can become more grammatical — though still dispreferred — if you make the intended argument expected enough: ‘I haven’t handed in my report because the photocopier ate it. The photocopier ate and ate and eventually spat out some mangled shreds.’ Or, ‘I always ride my motorcycle to work. Today I saw a car accident while I was riding.’)
Last edited by bradrn on Thu Aug 27, 2020 10:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Syntax random
Well, yes. The original argument (as I understand the entry in the SCK), is that object deletion is strange, because there is no transformational explanation for the grammaticalness (grammaticity?) of the resulting sentence. If we take it instead the position that the underlying verb was really intransitive all along, then this so-called "object deletion" is not just entirely unremarkable, it's a backward analysis of what I believe is happening, namely an object insertion.bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 9:15 pmInteresting interpretation — but is there any difference really between saying that they are originally intransitive verbs which have been made transitive vs originally transitive verbs which are made intransitive?My meaning is really that here the transitives should be read as derived from the intransitive, not the other way around, hence deletion of the object is not anomalous in any fashion: it's really just a return to a base state.
In diachronic terms, "object deletion" is the logical (inevitable, even) consequence of a previously intransitive verb gaining a transitive construction.
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Re: Syntax random
I think you've found something really interesting, though I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation.Circeus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 8:21 pm I am smokingcigarettes→ I am smoking
I am smokingsalmon→ *I am smoking
I am ridinga horse→ I am riding
I am ridinga motorcycle→ *I am riding
The goat atemy report→ The goat ate
The photocopier atemy report→ *The photocopier ate [maybe no ungrammatical in the strictest sense, still highly infelicitous at best]
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
I don't think these are cognate objects, simply because they're not at all semantically vacuous. "Take a ride" is vacuous; it just means "ride". "Ride a horse" is not vacuous; there are many things you can ride, a horse is just one of them. What you're pointing out is that there's a kind of automatic fill-in of the most likely object. Maybe pragmatic, but it's interesting that the default object is "horse" when people are far more likely to ride a bicycle or motorcycle or train these days. In support of that, I'd note that you can change the default object with the right context: "I just bought a bicycle. I'm going to go out riding!"
You also suggest that they're ambitransitive. Wikipedia calls these agentive ambitransitives: e.g. "Mary is knitting a sweater" vs. "Mary is knitting". OK, cool, except that its examples (eat, follow, help, knit, read, try, watch, win, know) don't show the discrepancy you've pointed out. That is, there is no default object for "knitting" that can be omitted, while other objects of "knitting" must be specified.
(Thinking more: maybe there is, in the case of metaphorical extensions. "Mary is knitting her brow" cannot be expressed "Mary is knitting." But that leaves your examples unexplained. Plus there are reasons that idioms break many transformations.)
Now, as I said, one syntacticians's Delete is another one's Add. I'm certainly not going to die on the hill of insisting that there is an underlying object somewhere that is deleted. I think the default object thing is quite interesting though. Does French work like this? I think "fumer" does; I don't think "monter" does?
Re: Syntax random
Isn’t it the other way around with “take a ride”? There, the argument ‘ride’ is certainly meaningful; it’s the verb ‘take’ that’s vacuous. I think a better example would be something like ‘calculate a number’, where the argument carries pretty much none of the meaning.
Possibly there are two classes of object-deleting verbs, one which has implied objects and another which doesn’t? e.g. ‘Ride’, ‘smoke’ have implied objects, whereas ‘eat’, ‘knit’ don’t. Potentially we could go further and say that the former class have intransitive forms derived from transitives, while the latter have transitive forms derived from intransitives.What you're pointing out is that there's a kind of automatic fill-in of the most likely object. Maybe pragmatic, but it's interesting that the default object is "horse" when people are far more likely to ride a bicycle or motorcycle or train these days. In support of that, I'd note that you can change the default object with the right context: "I just bought a bicycle. I'm going to go out riding!"
You also suggest that they're ambitransitive. Wikipedia calls these agentive ambitransitives: e.g. "Mary is knitting a sweater" vs. "Mary is knitting". OK, cool, except that its examples (eat, follow, help, knit, read, try, watch, win, know) don't show the discrepancy you've pointed out. That is, there is no default object for "knitting" that can be omitted, while other objects of "knitting" must be specified.
…
Now, as I said, one syntacticians's Delete is another one's Add. I'm certainly not going to die on the hill of insisting that there is an underlying object somewhere that is deleted. I think the default object thing is quite interesting though. Does French work like this? I think "fumer" does; I don't think "monter" does?
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Re: Syntax random
I read knitting as having a defined object. It's not a specific one like "ride" (indeed ride is the only one of these with a specific word/concept as the unstated object), but it is well circumscribe the same way that of eat ("something edible") or Smoke ("Tobacco or an equivalent substance in one form or another") is.zompist wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 11:28 pm You also suggest that they're ambitransitive. Wikipedia calls these agentive ambitransitives: e.g. "Mary is knitting a sweater" vs. "Mary is knitting". OK, cool, except that its examples (eat, follow, help, knit, read, try, watch, win, know) don't show the discrepancy you've pointed out. That is, there is no default object for "knitting" that can be omitted, while other objects of "knitting" must be specified.
(Thinking more: maybe there is, in the case of metaphorical extensions. "Mary is knitting her brow" cannot be expressed "Mary is knitting." But that leaves your examples unexplained. Plus there are reasons that idioms break many transformations.)
They both do. Manger, tricoter, regarder, lire and gagner also have an intransitive form that matches exactly a transitive in the same way the English does. Aider, savoir, suivre, essayer and connaître, on the other hand, require that the implied object be established pragmatically in some way first, and not all meanings allow it (you cannot delete an animate object for connaître). I'm not entirely sure some of the English "agentives" are a perfect fit for the first category. "I read." and "I knit." are entirely innocuous statement in isolation, but we instinctively feel the lack of information with an isolated "?I help" or "?I followed".Now, as I said, one syntacticians's Delete is another one's Add. I'm certainly not going to die on the hill of insisting that there is an underlying object somewhere that is deleted. I think the default object thing is quite interesting though. Does French work like this? I think "fumer" does; I don't think "monter" does?
I'm starting to think the ability to not mention an object that is well established pragmatically may be a separate characteristic of English. Probably a side effect of how easily English words jump between lexical classes (or subclasses): I don't think this (and especially not shifting from an intransitive to a transitive or vice-versa) is nearly as common in German. Whether it must be account by syntactic transformation, bringing us back where we started, I do not know: as I said, I am not super good at theoretical syntactic thinking XD It's probably one of those cases that construction syntax handles more easily than Chomskyan approaches, though.
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Re: Syntax random
A most interesting sentence I thought up: ‘Reading to myself is nice’. Clearly this is a grammatical sentence (at least it is for me) — yet it has a reflexive without any antecedent. What is happening here?
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Re: Syntax random
"Reading" has an obvious understood subject, "me". So I'd say the underlying S is "[me reading to me] is nice". Reflexivization applies first, then the subject is deleted.
As confirmation, note that overt subjects can occur in this construction: "Johnny reading to himself is so cute."
Re: Syntax random
Thank you! I had assumed that there was no underlying subject due to the ungrammaticality of *‘Me reading to myself is nice’; I didn’t realise that other subjects would be fine, so thanks for pointing that out.zompist wrote: ↑Sat Sep 05, 2020 10:47 pm"Reading" has an obvious understood subject, "me". So I'd say the underlying S is "[me reading to me] is nice". Reflexivization applies first, then the subject is deleted.
As confirmation, note that overt subjects can occur in this construction: "Johnny reading to himself is so cute."
A further question: under what conditions can the subject be deleted?
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Re: Syntax random
I dunno… it just sounds really weird. It’s the sort of sentence I would prefix with ?? if I were using it as an example.
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