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, Kyoto, Japan Kobe Linguistics Club in Kyoto The Main Determinants of Sentence Meaning: Verbs or Constructions? Kensei Sugayama ken@kpu.ac.jp Department of English Linguistics Kyoto Prefectural University 1. Introduction What types of linguistic information do people use to construct the meaning of a sentence? The purpose of this paper is to provide a plausible argument against CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACHES to grammar. The basic idea assumed in them is that the simple sentence types in English are directly correlated with one or more semantic structures. In this paper, I argue that there are motivations supporting the traditional view that the basic sentence patterns of a language are determined by semantic or syntactic information specified by the main verb. What I want to argue is that a PROJECTIONIST APPROACH is at least possible. 2. (1) Why Constructions? A natural correspondence between the number and types of actors as it were in the scene, and the number and types of actors typically associated with the predicate. a. She sneezed. b. She kicked the table. c. Pat gave Chris a book. d. She threw her glass across the room. Sem: intend-CAUSE-RECEIVE (agt | | R: instance GIVE (give-er Syn: Fig. 1 (3) (4) (5) Sem: intend-CAUSE-RECEIVE (agt | | R: instance BAKE (bake-er Syn: Fig. 2 verb Subj rec theme) | bake-ed) Obj2 verb Subj theme) | give-en) Obj2

(2) rec give-ee Obj1

The Ditransitive Construction (cf. Goldberg 2006: 20)

Pat baked Chris a cake. Pat baked a cake for Chris (because Chris was out of the country).

Obj1

The Ditransitive Construction (cf. Goldberg 2006: 20)

24/8/2007, Ryukoku Univ., Kyoto, Japan Kobe Linguistics Club in Kyoto (6) a. I brought a glass of water to John/the table. b. I brought John/*the table a glass of water. (Partee 1965: 60)

Implausible verb senses (7) a. Pat sneezed. b. Pat sneezed the foam off the cappuccino. (Ahrens 1995) (8) Sem: R: instance Syn: Fig. 3 (9) CAUSE-MOVE | SNEEZE verb (cause | (sneeze-er Subj goal theme) | ) Obj2

Obl

The Caused-Motion Construction (cf. Goldberg 2006: 20)

a. She sneezed a terrible sneeze. (cognate object construction) b. She sneezed her nose red. (the resultative construction) c. She sneezed her way to the emergency room. (the way construction)

Proliferation of verb senses (10) a. Joe kicked the wall. b. Mum! Jimmy kicked me! [MED2] c. Joe kicked Bob black and blue. d. Some children will bite and kick when they get angry. [MED2] e. The horse kicks. f. Take your babys nappy off and let her kick a bit. [MED2] g. Joe kicked the football into the stadium. h. He kicked the bottle towards the bin and missed. [MED2] i. Joe kicked at the football. j. Joe kicked his foot against the chair. k. Joe kicked the chair with his foot. l. Joe kicked Bob the football. m. Joe kicked his way out of the operating room. Kick is a binary relation, and therefore must have two and only complements. A verb is an n-ary predicate and therefore has n complements when and only when it has n complements. Instead, the ternary relation can be directly associated with the skeletal ditransitive construction.

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24/8/2007, Ryukoku Univ., Kyoto, Japan Kobe Linguistics Club in Kyoto Sem: intend-CAUSE-RECEIVE (agt | | R: means KICK (kick-er Syn: Fig. 4 verb Subj rec theme) | kick-ed) Obj2

Obj1

The Ditransitive Construction (cf. Goldberg 2006: 20)

Sentential effects (11) a. ?TV is watched. b. TV is watched an average of six hours per day. (12) a. *She sent the countryside a package. b. She sent the Countess a package. Support from language aquisition (13) Children use the syntactic frames that a verb is heard used with in order to determines the verbs meaning (Landau and Gleitman 1985). (14) Experimental evidence that children do pay attention to the syntactic frames and that they can use that information to narrow down the choice of possible verb meanings (Niagles 1990; Sethuraman et al. 1997). 3. (15) Constructions: what they are C is a CONSTRUCTION iffdef C is a form-meaning pair <Fi, Si>, such that some aspect of the form Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from C's component parts or from other previously established constructions. (Goldberg 1995: 4)

(16) TABLE 1. Examples of constructions, varying in size and complexity; form and function are specied if not readily transparent Form/Example Function Construction Morpheme Word Complex word Idiom (lled) Idiom (partially lled) e.g. anti-, pre-, -ing e.g. Avocado, anaconda, and e.g. Daredevil, shoo-in e.g. Going great guns e.g. Jog <someones> memory Form: The Xer the Yer (e.g. The more you think about it, the less you understand) Meaning: linked independent and dependent variables

Covariational-Conditiona l Construction1

24/8/2007, Ryukoku Univ., Kyoto, Japan Kobe Linguistics Club in Kyoto Form: Subj [V Obj1 Obj2] (e.g. He gave her a Coke; He baked her a mufn) Form: Subj aux VPpp (PPby) (e.g. The armadillo was hit by a car) Meaning: transfer (intended or actual) Discourse function: to make undergoer topical and/or actor non-topical

Ditransitive (double-object) construction Passive

(cf. Goldberg 2003: 220; Goldberg 2006: 5) (17) TABLE 2. English Argument Structure Constructions Construction Form Meaning Example Transitive Subject Verb Object X act on Y Pat opened the door. Ditransitive Subject Verb Object1 X causes Y to Sue gave her a pen. Object2 receive Z Sue faxed her a letter. Resultative Subject Verb Object X causes Y to Kim made him mad. Complement become Z Kim talked himself silly. Caused Subject: Verb Object X causes Y to Joe put the cat on motion Oblique move Z the mat. Joe sneezed the foam off the cappuccino. (cf. Bencini and Goldberg 2000: 642)

4. Three Arguments against Constructional Meaning 4.1 New Denominal Verbs Whether or not fax or wand can appear in the ditransitive construction depends on whether or not the verb designates the scene of transfer. (18) (19) a. He faxed the letter. b. The librarian wanded the barcode. a. fax is a verb of information transfer b. wand is not a verb of information transfer

Ditransitive construction (20) a. He faxed me the letter. b. *The librarian wanded me the barcode. (Goldberg 2007) (21) He mailed/cabled/radioed/e-mailed me the letter.

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a. I'm covered in awful skin tags, can't leave the house unless I've tweezered off the hair on my chin and face, have bad rosacea for which I use metronidazole gel, my scalp is full of plaques and I feel and look hideous. ... (http://www.verity-pcos.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=9323& sid=bcf2557f00e83d775ecf475848ec6e46) b. In 1995, antiquarian dealer Gilbert Bland was caught outside Baltimore's Peabody Library with four maps he had just razored out of a 200-year-old book. Police also found his notebook, which read like a shopping list through the great... (www.theweeweb.co.uk/public/article_details.php?article_id=4 8)

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He raked/vacuumed the leaves off the sidewalk.

4.2 Argument Structure Construction How it could be possible to absorb such a variety of meaning into the prototypical meaning of the transitive construction (24) (25) X ACT ON Y (TABLE 2 in (17)) a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. j. k. l. The engineer built the bridge. (effected object/factitive) (Levin 2007) The engineer destroyed the bridge. (consumed object/patient) The engineer widened the bridge. (patient) The engineer moved the bridge. (theme) The engineer washed the bridge. (location/surface) The engineer crossed the bridge. (location) The engineer reached the bridge. (goal) The engineer left the bridge. (source) The engineer saw the bridge. (object of perception) The engineer hated the bridge. (stimulus) The engineer avoided the bridge. (?) The engineer studied the bridge. (?)

4.3 Event Structure and Augmentation the resultative construction in Table 2 is considered to be the event structure of a main verb being augmented. (26) An activity sense a. [x ACT <SWEEP> y] b. Terry swept [the floor]. z Sweep of activity sense has an event structure template consisting of a single event. z Both participants (x, y) are associated with the same subevent. z Only one of the two (i.e. x) needs to be expressed and the other (y) is a semantically invoked argument, rather than a structural participant, therefore, not necessarily expressed, which is indicated by the square
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24/8/2007, Ryukoku Univ., Kyoto, Japan Kobe Linguistics Club in Kyoto brackets around the floor in (15b). (27) A change of state sense a. [[x ACT <SWEEP> y] CAUSE [BECOME [y/z <STATE>]]] b. Terry swept the floor clean. (y:y) c. Terry swept the leaves into a pile. (y:z) z The causing subevent the result subevent [change of state] z Each subevent is identified by a predicate (sweep, <STATE>) and associated with an argument NP. z Omitting object would leave subevent without an associated NP, leading to ungrammaticality: *Terry swept clean. A removal sense a. [[x ACT <SWEEP> y] CAUSE [BECOME [z <PLACE>]]] b. Terry swept the leaves off the pavement. z Semantic structure of this sense is the same as that of change of state sense except that semantic participant (y) is not the same as the structural participant (z). a. b. a. b. a. b. a. c. ??Ann pulled Beth the box. Ann pulled the box to Beth. (Krifka 2003) Ann threw Beth the box. Ann threw the box to Beth. (Krifka 2003) I cleared Bill a place on the floor. (Lee 1991) ? I cleared Bill the floor. (Lee 1991) He opened me a can of sardines. (Lee 1991) ? He opened me the door. (Lee 1991)

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(29) (30) (31) (32) (33)

*I mowed Mary the lawn. (Lee 1991) Frame semantic knowledge of the concept associated with the verb Kicking involves an abrupt forceful motion of the leg such that the leg is brought away from the body and then returned. The ditransitive construction will make reference to the fact that it can occur with verbs which can cause ballistic motion. The fact that kick is such a verb will be inferred from ITS FRAME SEMANTICS, i.e. from the fact that kicking can be used to cause an object to move by an abrupt motion of the leg. We do not need to claim that the semantics of kick undergoes any change when used ditransitively.

The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of a verb, because argument roles in a construction actually are projected from the frame semantics of a verb (i.e., verb meaning).
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5. Conclusion Why is a theory of verb meaning important? Verbs name events or states with participants, making them the organisational core of the sentence, so their meaning is key to sentence meaning (as witness Word Grammar (Sugayama and Hudson 2005)). To the extent that a verbs meaning appears to determine its argument realisation options, looking at verbs with shared or overlapping patterns of argument realisation provides a way of isolating linguistically-relevant components of verb meaning. In this paper, I have attempted to show that aspects of the sentence meaning still perpetuate the projectionist approach. Constructional and projectionist approaches are often contrasted, yet both incorporate the same important assumption about the nature of the meaning of sentences with verbs and their arguments. The contrast is stark, and, in my own view, the reality of grammar lies somewhere in the middle between two extremes.

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24/8/2007, Ryukoku Univ., Kyoto, Japan Kobe Linguistics Club in Kyoto Langacker, R.W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, R.W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lee, D. (1991). Cognitive Linguistics. Melbourne: OUP. Levin, B. (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Levin, B. (2007). The Lexical Semantics of Verbs I: Introduction and Causal Approaches to Lexical Semantic Representation. Handouts from Course LSA 113P, LSA Linguistic Institute, July 2007, Stanford University. Levin, B. and Rappaport Hovav, M. (1991). Wiping the Slate Clean. Cognition 41. 123-151. Levin, B. and Rappaport Hovav, M. (1995). Unaccusativity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levin, B. and Rappaport Hovav, M. (1999). Two Structures for Compositionally Derived Events. In T. Matthews and D. Strolovitch (eds.). SALT IX: Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistics Theory. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, Cornell University. 199-223. Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. (2007). 2nd edition. Oxford: Macmillan Education. Michaelis, L. and Lambrecht, K. (1996). Toward a Construction-Based Theory of Language Function: The Case of Nominal Extraposition. Language 72.2. 215247. Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language 17. 357-374. Partee, B.H. (1965). Subject and Object in Modern English. PhD diss., MIT. Also published 1979 in Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics Series. New Yrok: Garland. Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rappaport Hovav, M. and Levin, B. (1998). Building verb meanings. In M. Butt and W. Geuder (eds.). The Projection of Arguments. Chicago: CSLI. 97-134. Sethuraman, N. , Goldberg, A. E. and Goodman, J. (1997). Using the Semantics Associated with Syntactic Frames for Interpretation without the Aid of Non-Linguistic Context. Clark, E. (ed.). Proceedings of the 28th Annual Child Language Research Forum. Stanford: CSLI. 283-293. van Valin, Robert D., Jr. (2007). Review of Adele Goldberg, Constructions at work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Journal of Linguistics 43.1. 234-40. Sugayama, K. (2006). A Lexical Semantics Approach to Designing a More User-Friendly EFL Dictionary. Humanities and Social Sciences, Scientific Reports of Kyoto Prefectural University 58. 33-46. Sugayama, K. to appear. The Main Determinants of Sentence Meaning: Verbs or Constructions?