How Do Verbs Cause Things? Splitting the Verb Phrase

How do verbs like "give" and "put" juggle more than one object? Is there an element that lets verbs cause things to happen? In this week's episode, we talk about splitting up the verb phrase: how our basic syntactic theory has a hard time with verbs with more than one object; how the syntax of causation shows us why we should expand our trees; and how once we break the phrase up, we can capture all sorts of facts, from two-object verbs to ambiguities.
This is Topic #88!
This week's tag language: Kajin M̧ajeļ!
Related videos:
Happy Little Trees: The Syntax of X' Theory - • Syntactic Trees and X'...
Referential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory - • Binding Theory and Int...
Up, Up, and Away: The Verb Phrase Initial Subject Hypothesis - • Where Do Subjects Star...
Last episode:
Worlds Between Us: The Pragmatics of Presuppositions - • Thinking vs. Knowing: ...
Other of our syntax videos:
Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - • What Changes in a Sent...
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - • What Questions Can't W...
A Clause for Celebration: A History of Syntactic Clauses - • What Makes a Basic Sen...
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on how these ideas connect to the passive voice, at: www.thelingspace.com/episode-88/
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Much of the basic argument found in the video can be found in this set of slides: apps.carleton.edu/people/cuss...
Examples were taken from Lisa Travis's 2010 book Inner Aspect (blogs.mcgill.ca/mcling/files/2...) and this paper by Heidi Harley:
babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/mrg.readi...
There's also good stuff in the Wikipedia article on causatives: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causati...
Some of the original work proposing splitting the VP includes Angelika Kratzer's 1996 paper "Severing the external
argument from its verb" in Rooryck & Zaring, eds., "Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109-137". (people.ucsc.edu/~mcclosk/Teac...) and Richard Larson's 1988 paper "On the double object construction" in Linguistic Inquiry 19(3), 335-391.
Looking forward to next time!

[@michellekwan3837]

Can’t believe something I’ve been trying so hard to understand through classes and texts has just been explained to me in 10 minutes. The teacher talks really well and the examples helped a lot too. Thank you so much!

[@wareya]

Hekomasu is actually a special case. Japanese treats fossilized causatives differently than non-fossilized ones. Hekomasu is either fossilized or can *also* be formed with the productive 'short' causative (~asu, as opposed to ~aseru, the long one). (There are a lot of verb forms in japanese that both have productive and fossilized interpretations.) Hekomu is an intransitive verb. With productive causatives, if the original verb was intransitive, then the old subject can usually be marked with *either* wo (direct object) or ni (indirect), though the nuance is different and one might be unnatural in a given phrase. With fossilized causatives, then the way you treat the case of the object is determined entirely by the particular fossilized verb you're working with. The biggest difference between fossilized and productive causatives of intransitive bases is that the sentence restructuring "step" doesn't happen with the fossilized ones, since they basically act like their own version of the verb, just like how "annoying" is more than a gerund/participle. Japanese is a great place to compare for this kind of stuff generally speaking, though, since switching between different particles when you change the valency of a verb has obvious effects that you can't see on the surface in english, and since some patterns inflect entire verb phrases instead of just the verb itself (like ~を...たい).

[@thelingspace]

Thanks for bringing this up! We discussed when we were writing the script whether it was better to use something like hekomasu, where there are a few dozen verbs that use the -as suffix, or to use the more productive -(s)ase. And we thought that the -as one better paralleled the other examples that we introduced in Malagasy and Tagalog. But you're totally right about all the facts here! I completely agree for this regarding Japanese, both in the specific and in general - Japanese and English have the opposite settings for a lot of syntactic things, so knowing both was a real help in understanding examples when they got brought up in linguistics classes.

[@Valdagast]

In Swedish, some verbs have different past tense for transitive and intransitive versions of the same verb. So "glassen smalt" (the ice cream melted) but "jag smälte glassen" (I melted the ice cream)

[@thelingspace]

Cool! And yeah, interactions with the causer showing up in the sentence or not makes sense. Thanks for the example! ^_^

[@KJYKJY1985]

I wonder if certain pairs of verbs in English like rise and raise, lie and lay, and sit and set started out the same way.

[@Valdagast]

In the Swedish example, the intransitive version is the irregular one and it is, sadly, dying on the vine. So if you speak to them youngsters, they may not recognize the difference. :o(

[@Pakanahymni]

Yes, they come from Proto-Germanic

[@Theternitend]

Wow, now that's an idea. I've always had the feeling that these so called ditransitive verbs could also be regarded as lexical causatives (to put A in B -> to cause A to be in B, to give A to B -> to cause B to have A), and as a conlanger this is something I've always taken into account almost unconciously. It's great to see a formal explanation. Thank you very much for this video :)

[@thelingspace]

Awesome! Thanks so much, we really appreciate it. I'll pass this on to the team. It's cool to see people taking these and putting them to concrete use. ^_^

[@valelantin1991]

I`d love to see a video about possible worlds semantics+ the Kratzer type of analysis to approach the meaning of modal constructions. :) Greetings from Austria!

[@thelingspace]

Good news! We already have an episode that touches on possible worlds semantics, in our discussion of type theory: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eYioaqyZhN12e7M And also, our next script coming from our staff writer Stephan is on Kratzer's modals. So you shouldn't have to wait too long. ^_^ (And I very much enjoyed the short time I spent in Austria, and I look forward to getting to go back one day!)

[@valelantin1991]

wow amazing, thanks a lot!!

[@vjorp5332]

Do you have some videos which explain the basics of this stuff? Are there maybe some free excerises on the internet to practice those weird trees? P.S I'm nor aliguist, but this stuff seems very interesting and can be used for conlanging. I have a problem with making complicated sentences.

[@thelingspace]

Sure, we've got a few links in our description that goes back to the beginning of our discussion of syntax, plus a couple of other videos that we think are relevant to understanding what we're talking about! Or you can just check out our full morphology and syntax playlist here, and pick out the syntax videos you're interested in! kzbin.info/aero/PLfLdA1jGDSu5fj9aEl46r0WcwYbsb_hwx And yeah, I definitely agree - being aware of syntax stuff for the purposes of good conlanging definitely makes sense to me. Good luck! ^_^

[@thelingspace]

Okay, so regarding exercises: after discussing this with our staff writer Stephan, I think the best approach to this is a series on All Things Linguistic, which also links to to other resources, including some exercises, as well. It's a really good primer for approaching how to draw trees: allthingslinguistic.com/post/100357884082/how-to-draw-syntax-trees-part-1-so-you-asked The challenge for a lot of exercises available is that if you change your theoretical stance on syntax, the way you draw the trees changes. But that series, along with our syntax videos, I think does a good job of explaining that. ^_^

[@frankharr9466]

O.K., I'm likely wrong, but to my mind "to Clark" in "give to Clark" isn't an object, it's a prepositional phrase, that is, a type of adverb. "Give Clark" would be a better example. Not that you can actually have that on it's own, it's still indirect. But it would feel better. Perhaps IO's are a species of promoted adverbs. Maybe not "Showed himself David" doesn't work but "Threw himself a party" does. So -self would refer to the subject because of things that have been previously discusssed. O.K., I started with a problem, and I'm ending without one. Cool. And this kind of fixes my problem with predicates. Very cool. Thanks.

[@xidavlaroe4188]

Squirrel Girl!

[@thelingspace]

Haha, yeah, I'm a big Squirrel Girl fan! Just eating the nuts and kicking the butts. We wanted a superhero-y feel to the backdrop for this one, and Squirrel Girl's basically my favourite on that front at the moment, so. ^_^