Verbs within Syntax and Morphology

2.2 Verbs within Syntax and Morphology

What is the essential property that makes verbs behave differently from nouns nd adjectives in morphology and syntax? There is actually an obvious starting-point in the widespread recognition that verbs are the quintessential predicates. They are inherently unsaturated expressions that hold of something else, and thus the nucleus around which sentences are typically built. Many linguists of different schools have recognized the significance of this. Among the formalists, Jackendoff (1977) partially defines verbs with the feature “+subject” (although this does not distinguish them from nouns, in his view). Among the functionalists Buechler[16, p.54] , identifies predi-cation as the pragmatic function that provides the external motivation for the category verb. The precise version of this intuition stated in (3)

(3)X is a verb if and only if X is a lexical category and X has a specifier.

Whether an item takes a specifier or not is thus an important characterizing feature for the functional categories. (3) claims that this property subdivides the lexical categories too. Those lexical categories that take a specifier are verbs; those that do not are nouns and adjectives.

The way a verb comes to have a specifier is somewhat different from the way ost functional categories do, however. Tenses and complementizers acquire their specifiers by movement: some constituent contained inside their complement moves to become the specifier of the phrase. This is not the case for verbs. Rather, the specifier of a verb usually comes from direct combination with some other phrase that is constructed independently. In Chomsky’s terms, verbs typically get specifiers from “External Merge,” whereas tenses and complementizers get specifiers by “Internal Merge.” In practice, this means that verbs usually assign a thematic role to the phrase that is their specifier. Following Chomsky’s[21, p.56-366] adaptation of Hale and Keyser (1993), there are two domains in which this happens (also Bowers [1993] and others). A verb that takes an AP or PP complement assigns a theme role to its specifier:

(5) a.Cigar made [VP him[ feel faint []] (him is theme of feel) [59]

A verb that takes an NP complement assigns an agent role to its specifier:

(6). It made [VP him [sick to look at them]] (him is agent of sick)

A verb can also take a VP complement, in which case it again assigns an agent ole to its specifier. The head of the lower VP almost always combines with the head of the higher VP, deriving a surface representation with only one spelled-out verb:

Examples in which a single verb appears to take two complements are always to be analyzed this way, as consisting of two verbal projections that take one comple-ment each, following Levinson [36] Palmer [41], and using Chomsky’s [21] terminology, we can call the higher verbal position in structures like (5)(in lower case), and the lower position V (in upper case). Both, however, qualify as verbs, as long as they have lexical content, given the definition in (1)

The structures in (5) (6) also exist without an overt NP, AP, or PP complement o the verb:

(7) a Cigar made [him [feel – ]] [59, p.76]

b It made [him [sick – ]] [59, p.76]

So the verbs have a covert complement in these cases, so that the theme and agent arguments are still in specifier positions. Hutchby and Wooffitt [30] actually make a somewhat stronger claim: they say that these phrase-structural configurations are the only ones in which NPs that bear theme and agent roles can be found. Let us consider the following:

Agent and theme roles can only be assigned to specifier positions.

This is a subpart of the Uniformity of Theta Role Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) of Baker (1988a), which Hutchby and Wooffitt [30, p.543] seek to derive. (6) is weaker than Hutchby and Wooffitt’s view, the agent role simply is the [−−V VP] configuration, they believe, and the theme role is the [−−V AP/PP] configuration. (In this, they were presumably inspired by Carter’s [19, p.45] view that thematic roles are designated positions in a conceptual structure.) The definitional view seems too strong, however. (6) is strong enough to have consequences: taken together with (4), it implies that simple nouns and adjectives can never assign agent or theme thematic roles.

It is tempting to try to combine (4) and (6) and make it the defining property of verbs that they assign agent and theme theta-roles.3 This would be a mistake, however. First, if these particular thematic roles were built into the definition, one would have to be sure one could distinguish them from other thematic roles in a reliable way. This is a notoriously difficult enterprise, the thematic roles having clear central instances but fuzzy boundaries. More importantly, there are a few verbs that do not assign any thematic role to their specifier. Verbs like seem and appear are the clearest case; perhaps weather predicates are another.

But even though these verbs have no thematic role to assign to a specifier, they must still have a specifier, in the form of the pleonastic pronoun it:

(8) a He made [(it) seem/appear that he was happy]

b Sowing the clouds made [∗(it) rain /snow]

This may seem like a peculiarity of English, since many languages do not require an overt pronoun with these verbs. However, this is simply because many languages never require overt pronouns, often because the person/number/gender features of the pronoun are adequately expressed in the verbal morphology, as in Spanish and Italian. Not surprisingly, the required subject of the verb shows up not as a pleonastic pronoun, but as a pleonastic subject agreement in these languages.

Auxiliary verbs also illustrate this same point. These are verbs that do not assign any thematic roles, but express only aspectual information, such as the progressive or the perfect:

a The box broke open

b The box has broken open.

c The box is breaking open.

The nominal the box is thematically related only to the verb break in these examples, and semantically the aspect has scope over the entire eventuality, including the subject. Therefore, on purely semantic grounds, one might expect the structures in (5).

(5) a has [VP the box [broken open]]

b is [VP the box [breaking open]]

But this is not what we find on the surface. Have and is are (nonprototypical) verbs, and as such they must have a specifier. In this case, they acquire one, not by theta-role assignment, nor by pleonastic insertion, but by NP-movement:

(6) a[VP the box has [VP [broken open]]

b [VP the box is [VP t[breaking open]]

Again, this is not a peculiarity of English. The semantically plausible Aux–Subject–Verb–Object order in (6) is not found in any SVO language, based on the data from 530 languages summarized in Julien (2000). Orders like (5) are found in the Celtic languages, but these are crucially VSO languages, where there is independent evidence that all verbs (not just auxiliaries) move to the left of their subjects.

The most challenging aspect of defending (1) is not to show that all verbs have specifiers, but to show that the other lexical categories cannot have them.

Nouns and adjectives certainly can appear without specifiers, as seen in (6)

(7) a Water is refreshing. (specifierless N)

b Cold water is refreshing. (specifierless A)

But they can also be used predicatively, in which case they seem to take subjects just as much as verbs do. I illustrated the subject-taking properties of various verbs in English by embedding them under the causative verb make, because make selects a bare VP complement (I assume), with no obvious functional head. Thus, in this context we can be relatively certain that it is the verb that requires a subject, not tense or some other functional head. But NPs and APs can also be embedded under make, in which case they too are preceded by a subject:

(8) a The chemist took a hydrogen and oxygen mixture and made [#(it) water].

b Then she put the water into the refrigerator to make [(it) cold].

This subtle contrast between verbs and other categories has no obvious connection to the superficial inflectional properties of verbs, but it does suggest that there is a structural difference between verbs and predicate nouns/adjectives. A theory that starts with the assumption that only verbs take subjects directly gives us immediate leverage on this paradigm.

So we encountered the different word classes of English and looked at the internal structure of words. In the following part we shall consider structures that are usually made up of more than one word, and look at how they are put together out of the word classes we have already examined. Here, then, we shall be considering the ways in which words are combined to make phrases, and investigate the structure of clauses, sentences and utterances.