Download The event structure of `symmetric predicates` - Userpage

2nd UK Postgraduate Conference in Cognitive Linguistics
University of Brighton, Friday 8th August 2008
The event structure of ‘symmetric predicates’
Florian Haas
Freie Universität Berlin
Institut für Englische Philologie
[email protected]
1. Symmetry as a logical notion (e.g. Partee et al. 1993: 40-41)
(1) “If (aRb) then (bRa)“
(2) Given a set A and a binary relation R in A, R is SYMMETRIC if and only if
for every ordered pair <x,y> in R, the pair <y,x> is also in R.
2. Classifying verbs as ‘symmetric’
The definition in (1) has been taken over to the classification of verbs, taking the interchangeability of arguments in the transitive realization of
meet, for instance, as criterial (cf. e.g. Dimitriadis 2008):
(3)
a. John and Mary met.
b. John met Mary.
c. Mary met John.
(4) a. “There can be no event of John meeting Mary without Mary meeting
John at the same time.” (Dimitriadis 2008: 329)
b. “A predicate is […] symmetric if (a) it expresses a binary relationship,
but (b) its two arguments have necessarily identical participation in
any event described by the predicate.” (Dimitriadis 2008: 329)
3. Problems with the traditional definition
(i) Exchanging arguments in those clauses involving symmetric predicates
where the participants are realized by separate arguments is rarely
meaning-preserving.
(ii) The intransitive realization of symmetric predicates often involves a
meaning shift that is not compatible with the bidirectional construal
of symmetry in (4).
3.1 Exchanging arguments does not preserve sentence meaning.
See Dong (1970), Fillmore (1972: 11-12), Stockwell et al. (1973: 311), Wandruzska (1973), Boadi (1975: 64-65), Kuno & Kaburaki (1977: 640-642),
Dowty (1979: 16; 1991: 586), Allan (1987: 64), Langacker (1991: 311-316),
Levin (1993: 59), Gleitman et al. (1996), Polinsky (1996), Talmy (2000:
312), Knjazev (2007):
(5)
(6)
(7)
a. The truck collided with the lamppost.
b. *The lamppost collided with the truck.
c. *The truck and the lamppost collided.
a. I gave the four of them a lift back from the party. Mary fought
with Paul all the way home in the back of the car; it was awful.
b. I gave the four of them a lift back from the party. Paul fought
with Mary all the way home in the back of the car; it was awful.
a. John willingly agrees with Fred.
b. Fred willingly agrees with John.
1
(8)
a. My sister resembles Madonna.
b. ?Madonna resembles my sister.
(9)
a. John is resembling Harry (more and more every week).
b. Harry is resembling John (more and more every week).
(10) a. I met my father in the kitchen.
b. My father met me in the kitchen.
(11) a. […] the excitement that children show when they meet books […]
b. ?[…] the excitement that children show when books meet them […]
3.2
•
Meaning shifts between transitive and intransitive realization
It is well-known that intransitive realizations, including verbs interacting with detransitivizing reflexive clitics, tend to differ in meaning from
the non-intransitive realizations of these verbs (cf. the references
above):
Turkish
(12) a. Birbiri -ni gör -dü -ler.
one.one -ACC see -PAST -3PL
‘They saw each other’
b. Gör -üş
-tü -ler.
see -MM -PAST -3PL
‘They met.’ (Kemmer 1993: 110)
Swedish
(13) a. Göran och Pernilla
ska se varandra.
G.
and P.
will see each.other
‘Göran and Pernilla will see each other.’
b. Göran och Pernilla ska se-s.
G.
and P.
will see-MM
‘Göran and Pernilla will meet.’
German
(14) a. Sie
haben einander
gesehen.
they have.PL one.another seen
‘They have seen one another.’
b. Sie
haben sich
gesehen.
they have.PL MM
seen
‘They have met.’
(15) a. Madonna and Prince Charles kissed each other.
b. Madonna and Britney Spears kissed.
•
The alternation at issue is also associated with meaning shifts in the
case of ‘symmetric’ verbs, although in a more subtle way:
(16) a. My father met me in the kitchen.
b. My father and I met in the kitchen.
(17) a. John willingly agrees with Fred.
b. John and Fred willingly agree.
c. John agrees with Fred’s opinion.
d. *John and Fred’s opinion agree.
(18) *The truck and the lamppost collided.
(19) *[…] the excitement that can be seen when children and books meet.
2nd UK Postgraduate Conference in Cognitive Linguistics
University of Brighton, Friday 8th August 2008
(20) a. I met John at the station. First, he didn’t see me.
b. John and I met at the station. #First, he didn’t see me.
Interim conclusion: the exchange test (cf. §2) is an approximation to a satisfactory characterization of symmetric verbs, but it relies on a too coarse-grained
view of meaning. The intransitive realization has a (collective) meaning component that is not accounted for in (1).
4. The meaning component of collectivity/joint action
•
Joint action prototypically involves simultaneous and coordinated individual actions. It includes mutual awareness and care about the status
of the group effort as a whole.
4.1Collectivity as a meaning component of reciprocal sentences
•
The collective meaning component is present to different degrees in reciprocal sentences in general (see Evans, in press), and especially in
sentences with ‘symmetric’ verbs (see 3.2 above).
(21) a. My father met me in the kitchen.
b. My father and I met in the kitchen.
4.2 Collective predicates and the bidirectional/reciprocal event
type
Def.: A collective predicate is one that requires a plural argument; or a predicate
that with a plural argument has an interpretation that is different from the interpretation that comes from universally quantifying over the parts of the plural
argument.
(Brisson 2003: 144; see also Lasersohn 1990)
(22) The girls gathered in the hallway.
(23) The children are a big group.
(24) George and Sandra are a happy couple.
•
collective and reciprocal situation types – one and the same thing? Brisson (2003: 144): Yes!; Kemmer (1997): No, but they are related via an
intermediate (‘indirect bilateral’) type!
Kemmer (1997): “In the prototypical reciprocal situation (e.g. ‘hit each other’,
‘touched each other’), the energy input directly affects each participant. As such
the level of affectedness is relatively high. In the [‘indirect bilateral’] type, on
the other hand, the affectedness is indirect rather than direct. […] The focus of
such constructions is not on affectedness of the participants by the verbal action, but on mutual interaction. […] each participant must adjust his/her actions to a considerable extent to those of the partner, or the mutual activity designated cannot be said to take place. The sense of accompaniment in carrying
out some overarching event is therefore considerably strengthened compared to
the reciprocal.” (237)
(25)
BIDIRECTIONAL > INDIRECT BILATERAL > COLLECTIVE
(26) Hypothesis 1: Allegedly ‘symmetric’ predicates (see the list in
Levin 1993: 62-63, for instance) are situated on different points on the
scale in (25), depending both on their argument realization (intransitive, transitive, or the prepositional type).
3
5. What does ‘necessarily identical participation’ mean?
Dowty (1987) proposes that the lexical representations of (collective) predicates provide ‘distributive subentailments’.
“[A]lthough collective predicates like gather obviously do not distribute down to
the individual members of the groups of which they are predicated in a literal
way (The students gather doesn’t entail *Every student individually gathered),
this doesn’t really mean that such predicates completely lack entailments about
the individual members of their group subjects. […] Thus gather distributively
entails some property of the members of its group subject (each undergoing a
change of location), but gathering itself can only be true of the group qua
group.” (1987: 101)
5.1 Symmetric subentailments
The idea is to use the concept of subentailment as a way of making explicit
the different degrees to which allegedly symmetric predicates require that
the participants involved exhibit identical participation in the event.
¾ SYMMETRIC SUBENTAILMENT = identical participation of participants with respect to a particular component of the event
(27)
NO SYMM. SUBENT.
> ONE SYMM. SUBENT. > … > ONLY SYMM. SUBENT.s
or simply: DEGREE OF IDENTICAL PARTICIPATION
(28) Hypothesis 2: Allegedly ‘symmetric’ predicates are situated on different points on the scale in (27), also depending on their argument realization.
Bringing the two scales together:
C
O
L
L
E
C
T
.
elect a president
h
gather
marry TRA
meet TRA
(see TRA)
(hit TRA)
intersect TRA
IDENTICAL PARTICIPATION
meet ITR
marry ITR
see each other
see each the other
Fig. 1
6. Conclusion
The class of ‘symmetric verbs’ is more heterogeneous than is suggested by a definition
based on logical relations. The bidirectionality (i.e. the idea of two conceptually distinct events going in opposite directions) implied by such a definition becomes marginal with the intransitive realization of the relevant verbs, given that the intransitive
construction typically construes the event as a collective activity. The transitive realization downplays bidirectionality in a different way, because it reduces the degree of
identical participation. An attempt was made at capturing the heterogeneous meanings of ‘symmetric predicates’ with the help of a two-dimensional representation.
2nd UK Postgraduate Conference in Cognitive Linguistics
University of Brighton, Friday 8th August 2008
References
Allan, Keith (1987). Hierarchies and the choice of left conjuncts (with particular attention to
English). Journal of Linguistics 23: 51-77.
Boadi, L. A. (1975). Reciprocal verbs and symmetrical predication. Journal of West African
Languages 10: 55-77.
Brisson, Christine (2003). Plurals, all, and the nonuniformity of collective predication. Linguistics and Philosophy 26: 129-184.
Dimitriadis, Alexis (2008). The event structure of irreducibly symmetric reciprocals. In:
Event structures in linguistic form and interpretation, ed. Johannes Dölling & Tatjana
Heyde-Zybatow, 327-354. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dong, Quang Phuc (1970). A note on conjoined noun phrases. Conneries Linguistiques 17:
94-101. Reprinted in: Studies out in left field: Studies presented to James D. McCawley on
the occasion of his 33rd or 34th birthday, ed. by A. M. Zwicky et al., 11-18. Edmonton: Linguistic Research Inc., 1971.
Dowty, David R. (1979). Word meaning and Montague Grammar. Dortrecht: Reidel
Dowty, David R. (1987). Collective predicates, distributive predicates, and all. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ESCOL, ed. F. Marshall, 97-115. Ohio: Ohio State University.
Dowty, David R. (1991). Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67: 547619.
Evans, Nicholas (in press). Complex events, propositional overlay, and the special status of
reciprocal clauses. In: Experimental and empirical methods in cognitive/functional research, ed. John Newman & Sally Rice. Stanford: CSLI Press.
Fillmore, Charles J. (1972). Speaker and roles. In: Semantics of natural languages, ed. Donald Davidson & Gilbert Harman 1-24. Dortrecht: Reidel.
Gleitman, Lila, Henry Gleitman, Carol Miller & Ruth Ostrin (1996). Similar, and similar concepts. Cognition 58: 321-376.
Haspelmath, Martin (2007). Further remarks on reciprocal constructions. In: Reciprocal
constructions. 5 vols., ed. Vladimir Nedjalkov, 2087-2115. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kemmer, Suzanne (1993). The middle voice. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kemmer, Suzanne (1997). Collective and distributive marking, or: where unity meets multiplicity. In: The twenty-third LACUS Forum 1996, ed. Alan K. Melby, 231-250. Chapel Hill,
NC: Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States.
Knjazev, Jurij P. (2007). Lexical reciprocals as a means of expressing reciprocal relations. In:
Nedjalkov (ed.), 115-146.
König, Ekkehard & Shigehiro Kokutani (2006). Towards a typology of reciprocal constructions: focus on German and Japanese. Linguistics 44: 271-302.
Kuno, Susumu & Etsuko Kaburaki (1977). Empathy and syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 627672.
Lakoff, George & Stanley Peters (1969). Phrasal conjunction and symmetric predicates. In:
Modern studies in English: Readings in Transformational Grammar, ed. David A. Reibel
and Sanford A. Shane, 113-142. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. II: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
5
Lasersohn, Peter (1990). Group action and spatio-temporal proximity. Linguistics and Philosophy 13: 179-206.
Levin, Beth (1993). English verb classes and alternations. Chicago/London: The University
of Chicago Press.
Partee, Barbara Hall, Alice ter Meulen & Robert E. Wall (1993). Mathematical methods in
linguistics. Dortrecht: Kluwer.
Polinsky, Maria (1996). Situation perspective: on the relations of thematic roles, discourse
categories, and grammatical relations to Figure and Ground. In Conceptual structure, discourse and language, ed. Adele Goldberg, 401–419. CLSI Publications.
Stockwell, Robert P., Paul Schachter & Barbara Hall Partee (1973). The major syntactic
structures of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Talmy, Leonard (2000). Towards a cognitive semantics. Vol. I: concept structuring systems.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Wandruzska, Ulrich (1973). Zur Syntax der symmetrischen Prädikate. Papiere zur Linguistik
5: 1-31.