Fodor & decomposition

Heidi Harley, Ling/Phil 596D

February 5, 2004

 

Fodor 1971: Three reasons for not analyzing kill as cause to die are not reasons not to analyze ÔmeltÕ as 'make meltedÕ

 

1          Fodor's paper:

 

1.         Some reasons to believe in syntactic lexical decomposition: pronominal reference to the embedded event:

            a.         Floyd melted the glass, and it surprised me.

            b.         Floyd melted the glass, and I was surprised that he/it would do so.

 

These sentences purport to show that there are two subevents in the verb melt, with which the pronoun or do so VP can be coreferential Ñ ei = causing (to melt) and e2 = melting

 

2.         However, with "kill" as "cause to die", such pronominal reference isn't possible.

            a. (overt "cause" morpheme):

            John caused Mary to die, and it surprised me that he/she did so.

            b. ("kill")

            John killed Mary, and it surprised me that he/*she did so.

 

3.         Why should "kill" and "melt" behave differently in this respect?

            ˆ at the end of the paper, Fodor suggests that itÕs because meltintr is homophonous with melttr, and the conditions on pronominalization and deletion care about such homophony.

            ˆ Problem: it seems quite well supported that structural identity is what matters for deletion, although there are also interesting restrictions having to do with auxiliary-homophony, see LasnikÕs recent work on the matter.

            ˆ if we adopt a sensible version of the Ôcause [X melt]Õ story for melt, we can keep the structural identity restriction, have a good story for the pronominal reference, and answer all of FÕs Ôthree reasonsÕ without really any trouble at all.

 

4.         So why does F argue that decomposition is inappropriate even for "melt"?

            Melttr behaves differently from its clausal paraphrase in two respects. 

            Consider first:

 

            a.         Floyd caused  the glass to melt on Sunday by heating it on Saturday.

            b.         Floyd melted the glass on Sunday by heating it on Saturday.

 

            When the verb is lexical, there is only one event, says Fodor, which may not be temporally distinct. But when you use "cause to X', there are two events, an event of causing and a result event, which may be temporally distinct. Hence, says Fodor, "cause to X" is not part of the representation of "melt" (or "kill")

 

5.         "subordinated sentoids" !!

 

6.         Second, subjects control instrumental adverbials:

            a.         John contacted Mary by using the telephone. (John used it, not Mary)

            b.         John caused Bill to die by swallowing his tongue. (Bill swallowed Bill's t.)

            c.         *John killed Bill by swallowing his tongue. (*Bill swallow Bill's t.)

 

Hence, causative verbs are not derived by "collapsing" the corresponding causative sentences.

 

7.          A version of a modern proposal, taken from Kratzer 1993:

 

(After a long excursus on the semantics of idioms and their interpretation, more next week) Kratzer presents evidence from Malagasy that external arguments are introduced by a separate morpheme from the main verb, an-.

 

            a. She concludes that the separate morpheme introducing external arguments is not a verb itself, but rather a functional projection, VoiceP. For us, it'll be equivalent to CAUSE.

            b. The structure for "Mittie fed the dog" then, will be the following:

 

         VoiceP<t>

 


DP<e>              Voice'

           

Mittie  Voice               VP<e,t>

 

             CAUSE  V<?>             DP<e>

 


                        feed                 the dog

 

This way, "Mittie" is not an argument of "feed", but an argument of "cause". The semantic representation of (b) is (c):

 

c.         [ Cause(Mittie, event) & Fed(the dog, event)]

 

which can be read, roughly, as "There was an event that Mittie caused, and it was an event of feeding the dog."

 

How can such a proposal be saved from Fodor's objections?

 

8.         If  event arguments must be bound by Tense, one significant difference between something like 2a and 2b is the number of Tense nodes that are available in the syntax:

            John caused (Tpast)) Bill to die (TInf) on Saturday by poisoning him on Friday.

            John killed (TPast) Bill on Saturday by poisoning him on Friday.

 

This will ensure that if there are two events in kill (or melt) Ñ a causing event and a dying event Ñ they have to be cotemporaneous, because bound by the same Tense operator. Ditto for Kratzer's treatment of feed.

 

Another way of saying this is that a temporal adverbial must compose with (adjoin to) a tense phrase (or possibly an event-phrase whose temporal reference is fixed by binding by Tense). Only one tense operator, only one tense adverbial allowed! (see Demirdache & Uribe-ExtebarriaÕs recent work.)

 

Te [CAUSE(Mittie, ei) & Fed (the dog, ei)]

 

This takes care of the temporal adverbial problem

 

(Alternatively, if event arguments are bound by an existential operator at vP, they will have to be the same event in John killed Bill (only one operator) but could be different events in John caused Bill to die (two operators)).

 

9.         An aside: in fact, with an adverbial that can appropriately modify either event, in fact you can get two readings for a sentence like He emptied the bottle again, as F notes in a rather cute counterargument against treating the temporal adverbial problem as an effect of ordering adverb-adjunction with the lexicalization treatment (his example is slowly but itÕs the same point).

 

            AGAIN[Cause (He, e) & empty (the bottle, e)] or

            [Cause (He, e) & AGAIN[empty (the bottle, e)]

 

That is, either he twice caused the bottle to be empty, or Mary (for instance) caused it to be empty once, and then it was refilled and he emptied it again.

 

10.       What about the instrumental adverbials? If

 

a.         John killed Bill by swallowing his tongue

 

is like this:

 

Johni CAUSE Billj DIE [PP by PROi/*j swallowing hisi/j tongue].

 

This is still a puzzle. The question is, why can't Bill be the one swallowing his tongue here? That is, why does John have to control PRO in (a), but not in (b) below?

 

 b.        Johni caused Billj to die by PROi/j swallowing hisi/j tongue?

 

Again, this seems fairly straightforward. You have to make a couple of assumptions about control theory. Assume that PRO has to be controlled by the closest available c-commanding subject. Further, assume that by PPs have to attach to vP (the equivalent of VP in older notation).

 

            Note that this makes sense if a) eventiveness comes from v and b) by PPs must semantically modify an event, not a state.

 

c.         John died/*was dead by swallowing his tongue.

 

(This in fact is a main difference between adjectival & eventive passives.)

 

If that's true, the difference between 10a) and 10b) just comes down to standard structural ambiguity, which we're agonizingly familiar with from such examples as Mary watched the man with the telescope. The structure of a) is below, and the two possible structures for b) are below: (I haven't illustrated it as a vP structure but you can draw it yourselves as an exercise).

 

a.                     TP                                                      

 

            DP                   T'

 


            Johni    T                     VP

 

                        [+pst]  VP                   PP

 

                        V                     DP       P                      VP

 


                        killed               Bill       by        DP                   V'

 

                                                                        PROi/*j V                     DP

 


                                                                                    swallowing      hisi/j tongue

 

b'.                    TP                                                      

 

            DP                   T'

 


            Johni    T                     VP

 

                        [+pst]  VP                               PP

 

                        V                    IP                      P                      VP

 


                        caused       DP        I'              by        DP                   V'

 

                                         Bill       I        VP                 PROi/*j V                     DP

 


                                                     to       V                              swallowing      hisi/j tongue

                       

                                                               die

 

b''.                    TP                                                      

 

            DP                   T'

 


            Johni    T                     VP

 

                        [+pst]  V                     IP       

 


                                    caused    DP                I'         

 

                                                   Bill          I                 VP      

 


                                                                  to        VP                          PP

 


                                                                             V                 P                      VP

 


                                                                             die               by        DP                   V'

 

                                                                                                            PROj/*i     V                 DP

 

                                                                                                                        swallowing      his

                                                                                                                                                tongue

 

in a), there's only one subject/SUBJECT in Spec-IP, and if control is sensitive to that relation, which it undoubtedly is then that's why Bill is not available as a possible controller for PRO. In b), given that there's two possible attachment sites for the by phrase, there's two possible controllers.

 

Remaining questions:

 

Why do melt and kill differ w/r to pronominal reference possibilities (1st ex) ?

 

Pronouns can refer back to a state...

 

11.       Moreley was dead, and it made Scrooge grumpy.

 

Melt probably encodes an endstate (being melted) which can be coreferred to with the same verb; I suspect that kill doesn't (so for kill, Fodor's right). Kill is a verb like run, hop, sneeze, push, etc. -- it has a zero-derived event-naming nominal form. Arguably, kill has a structure like H&K's structure for unergative verbs, with an incorporated N root. Consequently, no embedded state for it to refer to.

 

In fact, the real problem that Fodor sees with lexical decomposition doesn't have to do with empirical arguments like the above, but rather has to do with a more fundamental question: if CAUSE doesn't mean cause (which takes a sentential complement), what does it mean? In what way is it explanatory to posit a head whose contribution to the semantics is imprecise? (This is the "plus-X" problem).

 

In the ideal world, we'd be able to show exact paraphrase equivalents. Since Kratzer's representation is essentially a causing event + a state, you'd think the semantics of melt should be close the semantics of make X liquid, or any other make [state] structure.

 

a)         *John made Mary sick on Tuesday by poisoning her on Monday. 

b)         John made Mary sick, and it surprised me that he did so.

            *John made Mary sick, and it surprised me that she did so.

 

If this is right, the v paraphrased as 'cause' with a clausal complement really means something more like 'make' with a stative complement.