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JoshuaCrowgey edited this page Oct 20, 2015 · 19 revisions

All Transitives are Derived

Lushootseed is a Central Salishan language spoken in the Puget Sound region of what is now Washington State, USA. One hypothesis about Salishan languages is that all verb roots are intransitive (Intransitivity Hypothesis; Davis and Matthewson, 2009), the corollary is that all transitive verbs are derived. This phenomenon brings up questions about how to perspicaciously model the semantic reflexion of such transitivization processes: should we provide structures which build up transitive predicates hand-in-hand with the morphological rules which derive them from intransitive bases? Or should we "swap out" one predicate for another in the application of transitivizing lexical rules? RMRS (CITATION NEEDED) may provide a way to model the compositional structure of transitivizing lexical rules in a typed-feature structure based grammar. The purpose of this session is to present some data which motivate the use of RMRS and to discuss the application of RMRS principles in this context.

Quoting Beck (2009):

"""

  • What are transitive verbs in most languages are derived from a large set of monovalent patient-oriented (Hess 1995) radicals whose syntactic subject expresses the semantic PATIENT or ENDPOINT of an event rather than the AGENT. Consider (1):

      1. a. ʔuɬič̓ čəd.
        ʔu-ɬič̓ čəd
        PFV-be.cut 1SG.SUB
        `I got cut with a knife.'
     b. ʔuɬič̓id čəd tə sqʷiqʷali
        ʔu-ɬič̓i-t čəd tə sqʷiqʷali
        PFV-be.cut-ICS 1SG.SUB INDEF hay
        ‘I started to cut hay (with a blade)’

    (Bates, Hess & Hilbert 1994: 146)

  • √ɬic̓ ‘be cut (with a knife)’—in spite of expressing an event high on the scale of semantic transitivity (Hopper & Thompson 1980)—can take only a single syntactic argument, a subject expressing the PATIENT of the event

  • to express an AGENT, it is necessary to apply a valency-increasing suffix such as the internal causative -t

"""

So, the Lushootseed lexicon has many such pairs of alternants where an underived verb has a single argument which seems to correspond most closely with what Dowty called proto-patient, and a derived transitive where both an argument in correspondence with proto-agent appears as well as one corresponding to proto-patient. This leads to questions about representations in MRS. One choice is to list the two verbs separately in a lexicon which is based on stems after derviational suffixes have applied:

ɬič̓=: intransitive-lex-item &
  [ STEM < "ɬič̓">,
    SYNSEM.LKEYS.KEYREL.PRED "_ɬič̓_v_be.cut_rel" ].

ɬič̓id =: transitive-lex-item & 
  [ STEM < "ɬič̓id">,
    SYNSEM.LKEYS.KEYREL.PRED "_ɬič̓id_v_be.cut_rel" ].

where

intransitive-lex-item := basic-one-arg-no-hcons & basic-icons-lex-item &
  [ ARG-ST < [ LOCAL.CONT.HOOK [ INDEX ref-ind & #ind,
                                 ICONS-KEY.IARG1 #clause ] ] >,
    SYNSEM [ LKEYS.KEYREL.ARG1 #ind,
    LOCAL.CONT.HOOK.CLAUSE-KEY #clause ] ].

transitive-lex-item := basic-two-arg-no-hcons & basic-icons-lex-item &
   [ ARG-ST < [ LOCAL.CONT.HOOK [ INDEX ref-ind & #ind1,
                                  ICONS-KEY.IARG1 #clause ] ],
              [ LOCAL.CONT.HOOK [ INDEX ref-ind & #ind2,
                                  ICONS-KEY.IARG1 #clause ] ] >,
     SYNSEM [ LKEYS.KEYREL [ ARG1 #ind1,
                             ARG2 #ind2 ],
              LOCAL.CONT.HOOK.CLAUSE-KEY #clause ] ].

But this misses the generalization that the event-type denoted by _ɬič̓_v_be.cut_rel and _ɬič̓id_v_be.cut_rel are linguistically the same, we have two predicate strings which refer to the same event type but with different argument structures, ie, we've packed a syntactic dependency into a semantic predicate name.

Another option would be to treat the transitivizer in a way similar to the ERG's treatment of periphrastic causatives. In this scenario, the transitivizing lex rules add a _cause_x_rel. Traditionally, this _cause_x_rel has its own characteristic variable, and then takes two further args, one corresponding to the CAUSER (perhaps something like a proto-agent), the other will be the characteristic (event) variable of the root. Under this sort of analysis, a verb like ɬič̓id would have semantics:

RELS:

  • [ _ɬič̓_v_be.cut_rel,

    • ARG0 e0 ARG1 x0 ],

    [ _cause_x_rel,

    • ARG0 e1 ARG1 e0 ARG2 x1 ]

We want this to mean something like x1 cut x0 with a knife.

One thing that stands out to me about this analysis is the "extra" e variable on the cause rel. That is, I don't yet see the motivation for this. I think one of the characteristics of the AGENT prototype is acting as a causer of an event. For example, the English verb "fell" means to cut down, but someone might argue that this is a morphological causative variant of "fall". The ERG demo gives _fell_v_rel(e,x0,x1) for fell in "Sandy felled the tree". If we are happy to analyze English transitives as denoting a single event, I'm not convinced that the presence of a derivational affix in Lushootseed is motivation enough to warrant a proliferation of event variables in the Lushootseed grammar.

A third idea for representing these structures comes from using Parsons-style decomposition of the arity such that:

  1. RELS which introduce event variables are always monadic, they predicate a string-label for the event and nothing more
  2. RELS for AGENT,PATIENT,GOAL,etc are bivalent, their signatures being something like this: REL-NAME(e,x).

Under this sort of system, (1a) looks like this:

[ _ɬič̓_v_rel,

  • ARG0 e0

], [ _patient_rel,

  • ARG0 e0, ARG1 x0 [ PNG 1sg ]

]

And (1b) looks almost exactly the same, but with the x0 being 3sg (some hay), and with one further REL added:

[ _agent_rel

  • ARG0 e0, ARG1 x1 [ PNG 1sg ]

]

RMRS

Data

References

  • Bates, Dawn and Hess, Thom and Hilbert, Vi (1994). Lushootseed Dictionary

  • Beck, David. (2009). A taxonomy and typology of Lushootseed valency-increasing suffixes. International Journal of American Linguistics 75, 533–569.

  • Beck, David. (2000). Semantic agents, syntactic subjects, and discourse topics: How to locate Lushootseed sentences in space and time. Studies in Language 24:2, 277–317.

  • Beck, David. (1996). Transitivity and causation in Lushootseed morphology. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 41, 109–140.

  • Davidson, Donald. (1967). "The Logical Form of Action Sentences". In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action. University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 81--95.

  • Davis, Henry and Matthewson, Lisa. (2009). TITLE OF ARTICLE HERE. 'Language and Linguistics Compass' REST OF CITATION HERE

  • Dowty, David (1989). "On the Semantic Content of the Notion of 'Thematic Role'" In Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee, and Raymond Tuner (eds.), Properties, Types and Meaning, II. pp 69--129

  • Dowty, David (1990). 1990. "Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection". Language. Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 547--619

  • Hess, Thom. (1993) "A schema for the presentation of Lushootseed verb stems". 'American Indian Linguistics and Ethnography in Honor of Laurence C. Thompson', University of Montana Occasional Papers on Linguistics no. 10, ed. by Anthony Mattina, and Timothy Montler, 113–27. Missoula, MT: University of Montana.

  • Parsons, Parsons, Terrence (1995). Thematic Relations and Arguments. Linguistic Inquiry. Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 635-662

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