Verbs and situations
Verbs and situations
some verbs will accept preposition phrases (for example to her in 4.2a). And sometimes positions are filled by embedded clauses (like the that-clauses in 4.2c–e).
A clause usually has a verb of its own and can carry a proposition, for example Spring has come early carries a proposition about the start of a season. In (4.2c, e) the same clause is not free-standing.
Embedded (which is to say “packed into”) another clause as object of the verb confirm. In (4.2d, e) we see a clause embedded as the subject. The word that is one of the markers made available by English grammar to mark a clause as embedded.
(4.2) a. I offered a scone to her.
b. This evidence confirms my hunch.
c. It confirms that spring has come early.
d. That the daffodils are blooming confirms my hunch.
e. That the daffodils are blooming confirms that spring has come early.
f. Offer him a scone.
The term argument is used to cover all kinds of obligatory, potentially referential constituents that verbs require, whether they are noun phrases (like This evidence) or embedded clauses (like that the daffodils are blooming or that spring has come early) or preposition phrases.
4.1 Causatives
The sentences above are causatives and each one entails the sentence to its right. From table above The sentences have either one or two arguments (in the special sense of argument introduced above) and they describe states or events. The causatives on the left differ from the corresponding sentences on the right in several ways:
They include a causative verb (make, get, force, cause, have, prevent in these examples).
The subject (the thought, the children, bad weather and so on) is an extra argument – in addition to the arguments of the corresponding sentence on the right.
The subject of the causative sentence is used to refer to whatever – human, abstract or concrete – brings about the situation described by the sentence on the right.
The causative has an embedded clause carrying the same proposition as the sentence to its right in the table. This is most clearly seen in I had (the students read this article), where the embedded clause is in parentheses. (Even here there has been a change. Think of how read is pronounced: in the causative as /ri:d/, the untensed base form of the verb, but as a past tense verb /r ed/ in the entailed free-standing clause.)
a causative sentence is: a situation is brought about – caused – by whatever the subject noun phrase refers to, and the caused situation is described by the embedded clause. The verb in the main clause of a causative sentence is a causative verb.
Cause is arguably a superordinate for the other causative verbs in Table 4.1
4.1.1 Adverbial diagnostics
Tenny (2000) proposes that a justification for this sort of claim can be found by looking at what is modified by certain adverbials, such as the preposition phrase for the week in (4.4a).
(4.4) a. The staff nurse gave Lucinda a key for the week.
b. The staff nurse caused Lucinda to have a key for the week.
c. Lucinda had a key for the week.
Because (4.4b) is a causative fitting the pattern to the left of them entailment arrow in (4.3), we should expect (4.4b) to entail (4.4c), and intuitively it does. There are several possible interpretations available for (4.4a), but on the most obvious one the staff nurse gave Lucinda a key once and Lucinda retained possession of it for the week. For sentence (4.4b), where for the week modifies the clause with have to indicate how long Lucinda had the key. The modifier does its work on the meaning carried by the entailed clause, the one describing the caused situation.
(4.5) The staff nurse a year earlier caused Lucinda to have a key in 2005
Whatever the scenario, the point is that two-clause causatives like (4.4b) and (4.5) can be used to describe. Indirect causation: someone does something and – perhaps accidentally; maybe after a long interval – causes a situation which can be traced back to that person’s act. The staff nurse gave Lucinda a key, describes direct causation, so (4.4a) is not suitable for expressing Lucinda getting a key in an event that was caused by an act distant in time and not intended to result in her having the key.
There are other ways of wording the report, but – perhaps surprisingly – it is possible to use the adverb again. This use of again is called restitutive:
The first sentence The baby ate some mashed banana is the only one that is transitive, which is to say that it is a clause with a subject argument (The baby) and a direct object argument (some mashed banana). Tourists walk through the eco park also has two arguments (You and through the eco park) but, because of the preposition through, the constituent through the eco park is not a direct object; so the sentence is intransitive, rather than transitive. Other intransitive sentences here are The bank’s interest rate dropped, The lawn died, Several vines grew and One of his teeth chipped.
An unergative verb requires a subject that is consciously responsiblefor what happens. Walk is such a verb and Tourists walk through the eco park is an unergative clause. A good test is acceptability with the adverb carefully, because taking care is only a possibility when an action is carried out deliberately. Tourists carefully walk through the eco park is unproblematic.
Unaccusative verbs are seen in The bank’s interest rate dropped, The lawn died, Several vines grew and One of his teeth chipped. These intransitives will not easily take the adverb carefully: *The bank’s interest rate carefully dropped, *The lawn carefully died, *Several vines carefully grew, *One of his teeth carefully chipped. Even if the subject argument is a human being, the sentence will be peculiar when carefully is put into construction with an unaccusative verb, for example *Mort carefully died. With an unaccusative verb, the subject is affected by the action but does not count as responsible for it.
4.2 Situation types
The four sentences in (4.7) illustrate Vendler’s four kinds of situation. His labels are given in parentheses. They are technical terms that are going to be explained here. Though achievement and accomplishment have positive connotations in ordinary usage, they are evaluatively neutral when we are talking about situation types.
(4.7) a. She got her ankle sprained. (achievement)
b. She had a sprained ankle. (state)
c. She had physiotherapy. (activity)
d. She got better. (accomplishment)
An achievement – there is not usually enough time to avoid the outcome by stopping partway through. This shows in the unacceptability of *She stopped getting her ankle sprained. It is different with the accomplishment meaning of get (seen in 4.7d): there is nothing linguistically strange about She stopped getting better.
Progressive aspect marking (BE + Verb-ing) highlights the durative phase of an event and ignores its termination chievements are encoded as not having duration, so progressive aspect is inapplicable to (4.7a), while the lead-in phase of an accomplishment has duration, allowing progressive marking on (4.7d).
State sentences such as (4.7b) do not readily accept progressive marking: *She was having a sprained ankle. On the other hand, the progressive is freely applicable to the activity use of have in (4.7c): She was having physiotherapy. (Going back to (4.7b) and the progressive: consider the possibility of a speaker saying in all seriousness: She was having a sprained ankle. In real conversations one does not usually say “That’s an asteriskable sentence.
Stop was one of the tests mentioned for distinguishing achievements (4.7a) from accomplishments (4.7d). Both states (4.7b) and activities (4.7c) can be stopped: She stopped having a sprained ankle; She stopped having physiotherapy. The first of these might not be the best way to say that the person in question no longer had a sprained ankle, but I think it is good nenough for a plus sign to go under stop in the states row of Table 4.3.
4.2.1 Accomplishments contain activities and achievements, which in turn contain states
When an unwell person gets better (an accomplishment), there is a phase of healing or taking medicine or whatever (an activity) which culminates in a transition from ill to well (an achievement), and immediately after that the person is in good health (a state). A compact representation of this is offered in (4.8): states and activities are taken as simple situations; an achievement is more complex because it contains a state as an embedded proposition; and an accomplishment is even more complex because it contains both an activity and an achievement.
(4.8) accomplishment = activity (achievement (state))
4.2.2 Agents and goals
The referent of an argument is an agent if the language encodes it as consciously responsible for what happens.
Carefully was offered as a test for agency. *Even small contributions carefully count, *I carefully heard a bang, indicating that the subjects of states and achievements are not agents, which is why they have been given a minus for the feature agent. *Even small contributions carefully count,
*I carefully heard a bang, indicating that the subjects of states and achievements are not agents, which is why they have been given a minus for the feature agent. If such sentences are intransitive, like Even small contributions count, then they are unaccusative.
It is different when an in-phrase is put with situation types that lack a goal (states and activities). You sound hoarse in five minutes could be taken as a warning that some kind of vocal malpractice leads rapidly to hoarseness, but that kind of transition is an achievement, not a state. He slept in five minutes is likely to be interpreted as an achievement clause meaning ‘He fell asleep in five minutes’.
States and activities go comfortably with for-phrases, however. These specify the duration of the state or activity: for example Axel owned a pair of jeans for a week, He slept for an hour. Because a goal is not part of the meaning, no sudden change at the end is encoded: Axel might or might not have got rid of his jeans at the end of the week; the person who slept could wake up after the hour or sleep on for another hour; the end is not made explicit.
Locative goal phrases, like to the corner, on to the plateau or home, when used with motion verbs like walk, crawl, swim or fly, have a role in accomplishment clauses. The completive particle up in The campers are packing up does a similar job of specifying the goal. The locative argument the field is no longer direct object; what we could call the “material” argument rye is the direct object. There is an interesting meaning difference here and, to highlight it, indefinite rye has been made definite the rye in (4.10);
(4.10) a. They planted the field with the rye. (meaning ‘the whole field was done’)
b. They planted the rye in the field. (meaning ‘all the rye was used up’)
some verbs will accept preposition phrases (for example to her in 4.2a). And sometimes positions are filled by embedded clauses (like the that-clauses in 4.2c–e).
A clause usually has a verb of its own and can carry a proposition, for example Spring has come early carries a proposition about the start of a season. In (4.2c, e) the same clause is not free-standing.
Embedded (which is to say “packed into”) another clause as object of the verb confirm. In (4.2d, e) we see a clause embedded as the subject. The word that is one of the markers made available by English grammar to mark a clause as embedded.
(4.2) a. I offered a scone to her.
b. This evidence confirms my hunch.
c. It confirms that spring has come early.
d. That the daffodils are blooming confirms my hunch.
e. That the daffodils are blooming confirms that spring has come early.
f. Offer him a scone.
The term argument is used to cover all kinds of obligatory, potentially referential constituents that verbs require, whether they are noun phrases (like This evidence) or embedded clauses (like that the daffodils are blooming or that spring has come early) or preposition phrases.
4.1 Causatives
The sentences above are causatives and each one entails the sentence to its right. From table above The sentences have either one or two arguments (in the special sense of argument introduced above) and they describe states or events. The causatives on the left differ from the corresponding sentences on the right in several ways:
They include a causative verb (make, get, force, cause, have, prevent in these examples).
The subject (the thought, the children, bad weather and so on) is an extra argument – in addition to the arguments of the corresponding sentence on the right.
The subject of the causative sentence is used to refer to whatever – human, abstract or concrete – brings about the situation described by the sentence on the right.
The causative has an embedded clause carrying the same proposition as the sentence to its right in the table. This is most clearly seen in I had (the students read this article), where the embedded clause is in parentheses. (Even here there has been a change. Think of how read is pronounced: in the causative as /ri:d/, the untensed base form of the verb, but as a past tense verb /r ed/ in the entailed free-standing clause.)
a causative sentence is: a situation is brought about – caused – by whatever the subject noun phrase refers to, and the caused situation is described by the embedded clause. The verb in the main clause of a causative sentence is a causative verb.
Cause is arguably a superordinate for the other causative verbs in Table 4.1
4.1.1 Adverbial diagnostics
Tenny (2000) proposes that a justification for this sort of claim can be found by looking at what is modified by certain adverbials, such as the preposition phrase for the week in (4.4a).
(4.4) a. The staff nurse gave Lucinda a key for the week.
b. The staff nurse caused Lucinda to have a key for the week.
c. Lucinda had a key for the week.
Because (4.4b) is a causative fitting the pattern to the left of them entailment arrow in (4.3), we should expect (4.4b) to entail (4.4c), and intuitively it does. There are several possible interpretations available for (4.4a), but on the most obvious one the staff nurse gave Lucinda a key once and Lucinda retained possession of it for the week. For sentence (4.4b), where for the week modifies the clause with have to indicate how long Lucinda had the key. The modifier does its work on the meaning carried by the entailed clause, the one describing the caused situation.
(4.5) The staff nurse a year earlier caused Lucinda to have a key in 2005
Whatever the scenario, the point is that two-clause causatives like (4.4b) and (4.5) can be used to describe. Indirect causation: someone does something and – perhaps accidentally; maybe after a long interval – causes a situation which can be traced back to that person’s act. The staff nurse gave Lucinda a key, describes direct causation, so (4.4a) is not suitable for expressing Lucinda getting a key in an event that was caused by an act distant in time and not intended to result in her having the key.
There are other ways of wording the report, but – perhaps surprisingly – it is possible to use the adverb again. This use of again is called restitutive:
The first sentence The baby ate some mashed banana is the only one that is transitive, which is to say that it is a clause with a subject argument (The baby) and a direct object argument (some mashed banana). Tourists walk through the eco park also has two arguments (You and through the eco park) but, because of the preposition through, the constituent through the eco park is not a direct object; so the sentence is intransitive, rather than transitive. Other intransitive sentences here are The bank’s interest rate dropped, The lawn died, Several vines grew and One of his teeth chipped.
An unergative verb requires a subject that is consciously responsiblefor what happens. Walk is such a verb and Tourists walk through the eco park is an unergative clause. A good test is acceptability with the adverb carefully, because taking care is only a possibility when an action is carried out deliberately. Tourists carefully walk through the eco park is unproblematic.
Unaccusative verbs are seen in The bank’s interest rate dropped, The lawn died, Several vines grew and One of his teeth chipped. These intransitives will not easily take the adverb carefully: *The bank’s interest rate carefully dropped, *The lawn carefully died, *Several vines carefully grew, *One of his teeth carefully chipped. Even if the subject argument is a human being, the sentence will be peculiar when carefully is put into construction with an unaccusative verb, for example *Mort carefully died. With an unaccusative verb, the subject is affected by the action but does not count as responsible for it.
4.2 Situation types
The four sentences in (4.7) illustrate Vendler’s four kinds of situation. His labels are given in parentheses. They are technical terms that are going to be explained here. Though achievement and accomplishment have positive connotations in ordinary usage, they are evaluatively neutral when we are talking about situation types.
(4.7) a. She got her ankle sprained. (achievement)
b. She had a sprained ankle. (state)
c. She had physiotherapy. (activity)
d. She got better. (accomplishment)
An achievement – there is not usually enough time to avoid the outcome by stopping partway through. This shows in the unacceptability of *She stopped getting her ankle sprained. It is different with the accomplishment meaning of get (seen in 4.7d): there is nothing linguistically strange about She stopped getting better.
Progressive aspect marking (BE + Verb-ing) highlights the durative phase of an event and ignores its termination chievements are encoded as not having duration, so progressive aspect is inapplicable to (4.7a), while the lead-in phase of an accomplishment has duration, allowing progressive marking on (4.7d).
State sentences such as (4.7b) do not readily accept progressive marking: *She was having a sprained ankle. On the other hand, the progressive is freely applicable to the activity use of have in (4.7c): She was having physiotherapy. (Going back to (4.7b) and the progressive: consider the possibility of a speaker saying in all seriousness: She was having a sprained ankle. In real conversations one does not usually say “That’s an asteriskable sentence.
Stop was one of the tests mentioned for distinguishing achievements (4.7a) from accomplishments (4.7d). Both states (4.7b) and activities (4.7c) can be stopped: She stopped having a sprained ankle; She stopped having physiotherapy. The first of these might not be the best way to say that the person in question no longer had a sprained ankle, but I think it is good nenough for a plus sign to go under stop in the states row of Table 4.3.
4.2.1 Accomplishments contain activities and achievements, which in turn contain states
When an unwell person gets better (an accomplishment), there is a phase of healing or taking medicine or whatever (an activity) which culminates in a transition from ill to well (an achievement), and immediately after that the person is in good health (a state). A compact representation of this is offered in (4.8): states and activities are taken as simple situations; an achievement is more complex because it contains a state as an embedded proposition; and an accomplishment is even more complex because it contains both an activity and an achievement.
(4.8) accomplishment = activity (achievement (state))
4.2.2 Agents and goals
The referent of an argument is an agent if the language encodes it as consciously responsible for what happens.
Carefully was offered as a test for agency. *Even small contributions carefully count, *I carefully heard a bang, indicating that the subjects of states and achievements are not agents, which is why they have been given a minus for the feature agent. *Even small contributions carefully count,
*I carefully heard a bang, indicating that the subjects of states and achievements are not agents, which is why they have been given a minus for the feature agent. If such sentences are intransitive, like Even small contributions count, then they are unaccusative.
It is different when an in-phrase is put with situation types that lack a goal (states and activities). You sound hoarse in five minutes could be taken as a warning that some kind of vocal malpractice leads rapidly to hoarseness, but that kind of transition is an achievement, not a state. He slept in five minutes is likely to be interpreted as an achievement clause meaning ‘He fell asleep in five minutes’.
States and activities go comfortably with for-phrases, however. These specify the duration of the state or activity: for example Axel owned a pair of jeans for a week, He slept for an hour. Because a goal is not part of the meaning, no sudden change at the end is encoded: Axel might or might not have got rid of his jeans at the end of the week; the person who slept could wake up after the hour or sleep on for another hour; the end is not made explicit.
Locative goal phrases, like to the corner, on to the plateau or home, when used with motion verbs like walk, crawl, swim or fly, have a role in accomplishment clauses. The completive particle up in The campers are packing up does a similar job of specifying the goal. The locative argument the field is no longer direct object; what we could call the “material” argument rye is the direct object. There is an interesting meaning difference here and, to highlight it, indefinite rye has been made definite the rye in (4.10);
(4.10) a. They planted the field with the rye. (meaning ‘the whole field was done’)
b. They planted the rye in the field. (meaning ‘all the rye was used up’)
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