This chapter will argue that the ontological categories that we require for understanding meaning and meaning composition in natural language cannot be exclusively proxied by external objects in the world or judgments of truth. In other words, a set of metaphysically justified ontological objects is not what is required for natural language ontology, and the latter field should be considered a distinct philosophical and analytical exercise. The chapter takes as its central empirical ground the meaning of ’nonfinite’ verb forms in English. Paradoxes relating to the English progressive and passive constructions will be examined to show that lexical conceptual content needs to be defined more essentially, and that the integration of such essentialist content into forms which ultimately have extensionalist import requires the reification of the symbol qua symbol and the explicit representation of the utterance situation.

Classical generative grammar partitions linguistic competence into three basic components: lexical knowledge, phrase structure rules and transformational rules (Chomsky 1965, 1981). One of the fundamental debates over the years, and one which is still alive today, concerns the division of labour between information and processes that reside in the lexicon and those rules and processes that are part of syntax.

In this book, I explore a view of the architecture of grammar whereby the lexicon is eliminated as a module with its own special primitives and modes of combination. By this, I do not intend to deny that there are items within the language that need to be listed/memorized, or that they are associated with grammatical information. Rather, I will seek to claim that to the extent that lexical behaviour is systematic and generalizable, this is due to syntactic modes of combination and not to distinct lexicon-internal processes (Hale and Keyser 1993, etc.). The general ideology is not novel; I am attempting to implement an old idea in the light of current, accumulated knowledge concerning the nature of ‘lexical’ generalizations and patterns. In pursuing, as I will, a radically unstructured view of the lexicon, I engage with recent ideas of constructionalism (Goldberg 1995, Marantz 1997b, Borer 2005) and make my own proposal based on what I take to be the core empirical issues of ‘thematic’ roles, event structure (aktionsart) and selection.

One of the things I will take for granted in this work is that human beings' linguistic competence includes, minimally and crucially, a (linguistically specific) combinatorial system.

In the previous chapter, I argued for a small set of basic argument relations that are implicated in the linguistic construction of eventive predication. In what follows, I will tie these argument relations to a syntactically represented event decomposition. The reason for this move is the claim that the generalizations at this level involve a kind of systematicity and recursion that is found in syntactic representations. The strongest hypothesis must be that the recursive system that underlies natural language computation resides in one particular module that need not be duplicated in other modules of grammar (i.e. in the lexicon, or in the general cognitive system). At the same time, this means that the semantics that is compositionally built up by the syntax at this level can only include those aspects of meaning that are genuinely predictable and systematic – many aspects of meaning that are traditionally included in descriptions of lexical verbs (e.g. thematic roles, certain kinds of semantic selection) must be excluded. The modularity that this involves has already been acknowledged within many theories of the lexicon as the difference between grammatically relevant lexical information and more general conceptual information, although the separation has mostly been argued to be internal to the lexicon itself (Hale and Keyser 1993, Jackendoff 1990, Grimshaw 1990, Kaufmann and Wunderlich 1998, Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995). The approach here is a little different in that the grammatically relevant information actually comes from the interpretation of the syntactic structures that the verbs participate in. Any concrete proposal along these lines inevitably involves making a decision about which aspects of meaning should be represented in the syntactic system and which should be seen as coming from lexical-encyclopedic content.

Introduction

We have seen that causativization is one of the important factors underlying verb alternations in English, and one which I have argued is built in to the interpretation of verbal decompositional structure in a fundamental way. In this chapter, I look more closely at the morphology associated with causativization in one language, Hindi/Urdu, which productively constructs transitive verbs from simpler, usually intransitive bases. The argument here will be that in accounting for the regular morphology and its syntactic/semantic consequences, we can get some justification for the abstract system of primitives being argued for in this book. At the same time, the comparison between English and Hindi/Urdu will allow us to formulate some specific hypotheses about the nature of parametric variation in constructing verbal meaning. The larger picture will be, firstly, that there is explicit evidence for decomposition from morphological and analytical constructions, and secondly, once again, that languages vary only in the ‘size’ of their lexical items, not in the fundamental building blocks of eventive meaning.

In chapter 4, I discussed the debate in the literature concerning the direction of the causative–inchoative alternation. Recall that Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995), Chierchia (2004) and Reinhart (2002) all agree in deriving the inchoative alternant from a lexically causative base. I argued in chapter 4 that the structure of the conceptual argument dissolves once one moves to a nonlexical, structure building framework. While the morphological evidence from some languages where the inchoative version of a verb transparently contains the verb itself plus a piece of ‘reflexivizing’ morphology (e.g. si in Italian, se in French, sja in Russian) seems to support a detransitivization story, typological work shows that this is not generally the case across languages (Haspelmath 1993).

Given the outlines of the system presented so far, we can use the primitives at our disposal to discuss the different natural classes of verb that emerge from this kind of syntactic organization. I wish to emphasize that this chapter is not intended primarily as a detailed investigation of any one set of phenomena. The purpose is to explore the ways in which this system can be used to analyse different possible verb types – the emphasis will be on the flexibilities and constraints on the system itself. In each case I indicate what verb types are possible and how they might be instantiated in English. I describe what the most natural mode of analysis would be for many common verb classes in English that have received treatment in the literature, pointing out where the system forces one to make choices between various analytical options. In all cases, the particular structures proposed here are intended to be starting points for more detailed research. In chapters 5 and 6, I take up the issues of path construction and causative formation respectively in more detail, and attempt to make some more substantive proposals.

In general, by taking seriously the event-structure participanthood of arguments, I aim to show that a somewhat different classification of verb types emerges. In addition, the system I am arguing for will allow flexibility in a verb's syntactic behaviour, within a system of constraints. Importantly, some of the previous principles of mapping between lexical information and syntax assumed in the literature will be abandoned.