Download Transitivity alternation with agentive verbs in BP: a semantic

Paper presented at Romania Nova VIII – November 2016 – Buenos Aires
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Transitivity alternation with agentive verbs in BP: a semantic-pragmatic account
Luana Amaral/ UFMG
Márcia Cançado/ UFMG1
It had been noted in recent research in Syntax and Semantics that agentive transitive
verbs, which would not normally accept intransitivization in many languages, do so in Brazilian
Portuguese (henceforth BP) (judgment data are from BP speakers):
(1) a. Fátima lavou a louça. ‘Fátima washed the dishes.’
b. A louça já lavou. ‘The dishes had already been washed.’2
(2) a. A corretora vendeu aquela casa. ‘The realtor sold that house.’
b. Aquela casa já vendeu. ‘That house has already been sold.’
(3) a. Os funcionários carregaram o caminhão. ‘The employees loaded the truck.’
b. O caminhão já carregou. ‘The truck has already been loaded.’
Based on Ciríaco and Cançado (2009), we propose an account of such phenomenon,
considering three main goals: first, to show that it differs from the well-known causative
alternation; second, to elaborate on its semantic and pragmatic properties and constraints; third,
to compare BP with European Portuguese (henceforth EP) judgment data, showing that the
alternation is specific of BP, not occurring in EP.
According to Cançado et al. (2013) (among many others), the causative alternation
occurs with change of state verbs only (break class), so it is lexically uniform and lexically
constrained, and the intransitive counterpart (called “inchoative”) denotes a spontaneous event
and may take the clitic se. Differently, the intransitive sentences in (1)-(3) (b) occur with at
least three different verb classes in BP: manner verbs (lavar class), verbs of change of
possession (vender class) and locatum verbs (carregar class). This shows that the alternation is
not lexically uniform. Besides, these intransitive sentences do not denote spontaneous events,
entailing the participation of an agent, and do not take the clitic se. Actually, they are preferably
licensed when marked by other items, such as já ‘already’, ainda não ‘not yet’ or question
prosody. Thus, the intransitives in (1)-(3) (b) do not result from the causative alternation. For
that, we call them “peripheral inchoatives”, contrasting them with canonical inchoatives (such
as o vaso se quebrou ‘the vase broke’).
In BP data we have noticed that the verbs which form peripheral inchoatives are all
transitive agentive verbs. We propose that a first constraint for the alternation is lexical: the
verbs must have the argument structure v: {Agent, Patient}. However, not all verbs with this
argument structure participate in the alternation, e.g. esfregar ‘scrub’, comprar ‘buy’, and vestir
‘dress’, which are respectively a manner verb, a verb of change of possession and a locatum
verb. Moreover, even verbs which are found in peripheral inchoatives do not alternate in some
cases; although the alternation in (1) is possible, Fátima lavou a orelha do menino ‘Fátima
washed the boy’s ear’/*a orelha do menino já lavou is not. Therefore, we conclude that the
alternation is constrained not only by lexical-semantic information, but also by pragmatic
information.
It seems that there is an implicature from these sentences that the action is being carried
out by an agent or by an instrument distinct from the speaker himself/herself. Lavar, for
instance, in sentences such as a louça já lavou, automatically refers to actions involving
washing machines. In addition, the speaker does not witness the action, but knows its expected
The authors thank Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais – FAPEMIG for the financial
support.
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The (b) examples as intransitive sentences are ungrammatical in English (e.g., *the dishes already washed), but
they can be translated into passive sentences.
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Paper presented at Romania Nova VIII – November 2016 – Buenos Aires
result and says something about it. In contexts where the speaker himself/herself performs the
actions described by lavar, vender, and carregar or where he/she has witnessed such actions
directly, the intransitive sentences are not appropriate. We propose that such implicature is
generalized, derived by Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quantity, and can be calculated as follows:
(4) - X Vagentive Y is a possible form to describe event E;
- The speaker A, to describe event E, uses the form Y já/ainda não... Vagentive;
+> the speaker is not X and does not witness X’s action in E.3
Thus, peripheral inchoatives are not licensed with verbs such as esfregar, comprar and
vestir, as well as with VPs such as lavar a orelha do menino, because these verbs and VPs are
not compatible with the pragmatic contexts required to generate the implicature in (4). We
conclude, then, that the alternating verbs (or VPs) must be able to, in the appropriate context,
generate the implicature shown in (4).
While canonical inchoatives are attested and very common in many languages,
including EP, as well as BP, peripheral inchoatives are not. In EP, lavar, vender, and carregar
do not intransitivize (Negrão and Viotti, 2011) (judgment data are from EP speakers):
(5) *a roupa já lavou/*o apartamento já vendeu/*o caminhão já carregou.
In our data, we have noticed that, in addition to the implicatures shown in relation to the
agent, peripheral inchoatives focus on the final result of the action, which is considered new or
most prominent information. According to Erteschik-Shir (2007), under a pragmatic account,
the focus is the relatively most important or salient information, the part of the utterance to
which the speaker intends to draw the listener’s attention. In utterances such as a louça já lavou,
aquela casa já vendeu, o caminhão já carregou, it does not matter for the speaker who is the
agent; what is relevant, in this case, is the fact that the dishes got clean, the sale of the house
occurred, and the truck is loaded, i.e., the results you expect to get when someone performs the
actions described by lavar, vender, and carregar were obtained.
While lexically constrained rules, such as the causative alternation, seem to be more
regular among languages (it is universal in Horvath and Siloni’s, 2011 analysis), pragmatic
categories vary largely in the way they are marked cross-linguistically. According to ErteschikShir (2007) information structure can be marked morphologically, syntactically, or prosodically
among the world’s languages. We cannot establish, at this point, a full explanation for the
occurrence of the alternation in BP and its absence in EP. However, since the intransitive
sentences give prominence to a pragmatically important element in the speech, we hypothesize
that the difference between both languages lies in the syntactic resources used to mark
pragmatic categories (more specifically, information structure). While BP uses peripheral
inchoatives to focus the result, EP uses other kinds of linguistic resources. Moreover, the
peripheral inchoatives, as we have shown, are used in BP to convey a specific meaning, present
in the implicature in (4). EP does not need to use that resource, since the language presents
other forms to mark the “distance” of the agent, such as the synthetic passive and other uses of
the clitic se, which are no longer present in BP. Further studies about this matter must be carried
on, though.
References
Cançado, M.; Godoy, L.; Amaral, L. Catálogo de verbos do português brasileiro. Vol 1 Verbos de mudança. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2013.
Ciríaco, L.; Cançado, M. A alternância causativo-ergativa no português brasileiro. Matraga, v.
16, n. 24, p. 216-231, 2009.
Erteschik-Shir, N. Information structure: the Syntax–Discourse Interface. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007.
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The symbol +> indicates an implicature.
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Paper presented at Romania Nova VIII – November 2016 – Buenos Aires
Grice, P. Logic and Conversation. In: Cole, P.; Morgan, J. (eds.). Syntax and Semantics 3:
Speech Acts, vol. 3, Nova York: Academic Press, 1975. p. 41-58.
Horvath, J.; Siloni, T. Causatives across components. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,
v. 29, n. 3, p. 657-704, 2011.
Negrão, E.; Viotti, E. A ergativização do português brasileiro: uma conversa continuada com
Carlos Franchi. In: Hora, D.; Negrão, E. Estudos da Linguagem. João Pessoa: Ideia/ UFPB,
2011. p. 37-61.
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