How does ‘a man’ become ‘the man’? Argument structure and existential propositions at the syntax-discourse interface Tricia Irwin, University of Pennsylvania [email protected]

NYU Syntax Brownbag  November 14, 2014

1

Introduction

This talk presents my recent work on existential sentences, argument structure, and the establishment of discourse referents.

1.1

Starting point

(1)

“The existential construction is used to introduce a (persistent) discourse referent.” (McNally, 1992: 4)

(2)

There was [a lady]pivot [at the door]coda

1.2

Two goals of this talk

Part 1

Show how two separate lines of research can be integrated to explain how existential sentences (∃S ) can serve the discourse function of introducing a discourse referent

Part 2

Show that if a certain class of unaccusative VPs has an existential predication, then these unaccusative sentences can have the same discourse function as ∃S like (2). i ii

Only some subjects of intransitives will introduce persistent discourse referents. The syntactic (and semantic) structure that a root occurs in matters as much (if not more) than the meaning contribution of the root.

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• Part 2 (ii) is a big picture point—but it is what the literature on existentials and “presentational” sentences has been saying all along.

1.3 1.3.1 (3)

Structure and overview Part 1: Existential sentences and “referential anchoring” Informal version of my claim: ∃S are able to serve the discourse function that they do because existential predications have a built-in link or anchor that links the new entity to the discourse context.

The analysis I will adopt for ∃S is a version of McCloskey (2014) (following McNally 1992; Milsark 1974). • The predicate in an ∃S is a special existential predicate • In my analysis: LocPred (4)

Predicate is an existential predicate (McCloskey-inspired analysis) vP

v

SC

SC DP a lady

PP at the door

LocPred

The McCloskey-inspired analysis in (4) contrasts with analyses of ∃S in which: • The predicate is the coda (or be + PP) (Freeze, 1992) • The predicate is the pivot itself ◦ Syntax literature: Hazout 2004; Myler 2014 ◦ Semantics literature: Keenan 1987; Williams 1984, 1994; Francez 2007

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(5)

Alternative analyses of ∃S (not pursued) A. Predicate is the coda

B.

Predicate is the pivot vP

vP v be

SC DP a lady

vP

PP at the door

v

PP at the door SC

PP DP there a lady My analysis puts together (4) with (6): (6)

Referential anchoring: a literature stemming from von Heusinger (2002) that aims to account for interpretations in indefinite DPs based on: a. b. :

(7)

The denotation of LocPred has the elements of referential anchoring in (6) built into it :

1.3.2

anchor: an individual (type e) that is given in the context anchoring function: relates an indefinite NP (e.g. a lady) to that given individual My addition: a contextually-determined location can be the anchor

Existential sentences anchor the new entity to an “anaphoric implicit argument,” whose value is determined by the context (Francez, 2010: 12).

Part 2: Existential unaccusatives

In this section, we will turn to non-be sentences, some of which, I will argue, are existential in their syntax and semantics. • There is more than one way for a syntactic structure to be unaccusative (Moro 1997; Hale and Keyser 2002; Kural 2002; Deal 2009; Irwin 2012)

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(8)

The “existential unaccusative” structure: v + root selects for a SC consisting of a pivot and LocPred.

(9)

A lady waltzed in vP

v

√

SC

waltzed DP a lady

LocPred

in

A root-based and structural approach to ∃S captures provides answers to questions that Guéron (1980) and Partee & Borschev have struggled with: (10)

2

What makes an existential/presentational verb? “The verbs that may occur in existential sentences are an open class; some are independently characterizable as existential or perceptual, and others may undergo ‘semantic bleaching”’ (Partee et al., 2011: 138)

Existential sentences and LOC

Intuition of a long research tradition: existential sentences have a spatial or temporal meaning as part of their core predication (Freeze 1992; Borschev and Partee 2002, and following; Francez 2007; McCloskey 2014).

2.1 (11)

A contextually-determined location Partee and Borschev: “existence is always relative to a ‘LOCation’, which may be implicit” (Partee and Borschev, 2004: 214)

For Partee and Borschev, existential sentences consist of three elements: THING, LOC, and Vbe (Partee et al., 2011: 141), as illustrated in (12): (12)

There was a princess at the renaissance fair. BE THING LOC

(13)

LOC: a physical location, a location in “perceiver’s perceptual field,” or “the virtual location of ‘in x’s possession’ ” (Partee et al., 2011: 142). 4

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Importantly, this LOC can be implicit (silent).

2.2

Formalizing LOC: Francez (2007)

Francez (2007): Proposes a formal semantics for the meaning of existential propositions • The meaning of an existential sentence is a predication between the pivot and a contextually-determined element ◦ Francez (2007): a set (of sets) ◦ Francez (2010): an “implicit anaphoric argument” • Informally, I will refer to this contextually-determined element LOC Informal representation of Francez’s insights (14), using terms from P&B: (14)

There was [ a princess LOC ] at the renaissance fair. [ THING LOC ] (modifier)

Crucial elements of (14): • Predication is between the pivot and LOC, not between the pivot and the coda • The coda is a modifier (an adjunct) • BE is not part of the predication In terms of information status, LOC is part of the CG and therefore given.

2.3

McCloskey (2014): A user-friendly implementation of LOC

McCloskey (2014) synthesizes Francez’s insights and McNally’s influential (1992) work on existential sentences. 2.3.1

The meaning of ann ‘in it’ in Irish existential sentences

Irish existential sentences contain the word ann ‘in it’, as in (15) (15)

Tá fion ann Is wine in-it There’s wine

McCloskey (2014) argues that ann ‘in it’ contains a predication involving Francez’s contextually-determined element. 5

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: A predication involving loc is realized overtly in Irish existential sentences (16)

Elements of McCloskey’s analysis The pivot is a set/property, type he, ti (McNally, 1992) The core predicate in existentials is instantiate (Milsark 1974; McNally 1992) iii. Part of the meaning of instantiate is a predication between the pivot and a contextually-determined spatio-temporal property (Francez 2007, though slightly simplified)

i. ii.

(17)

Syntax of Irish existential sentences, for McCloskey a. b.

(18)

SC structure: subject of the SC is the pivot Predicate of the SC is ann ‘in it’. : ann is a non-verbal predicate.

SC complement of v vP v BE

SC DP XP wine [ pred ] ann

2.3.2

Encoding context-dependence in the predicate ann ‘in it’

The meaning of ann encodes context-dependence. (19)

ann is “the property that a property has when it is instantiated by some individual x located at a contextually defined spatio-temporal location” (p.36).

The context-dependence of ann is given in the underlined portion of the denotation in (20) (from McCloskey, p. 36, underlining added). (20)

J ann K = ńP [instantiate ( ∩ ńx (P(x) & R(x, a)) )]

(21)

Informally, P takes a set and says that there’s an instantiation of a particular

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element of that set that is in a salient relationship with a contextually-determined spatio-temporal location. (22)

How does R(x, a) encode the context-dependence of an existential proposition? a. b. c. d.

R is a salient relationship (e.g., ownership, a location relationship) a is a context-dependent, spatio-temporal location x is basically an individual (a type-shifted property, really)1 R(x, a) predicates a salient relationship between an individual and a pronoun-like (contextually-determined) location.

The meaning of (15) is given in (23), a simplified version of McCloskey’s (82), p. 36: (23)

instantiate ( ∩ ńx (wine(x) & R(x, here-at-home)) ) :

•

2.4

“the property of being an instance of . . . wine is instantiated by some entity x at some contextually salient spatio-temporal location a”—e.g., “the present home of the interlocutors” (McCloskey, p. 36) For concreteness, I have glossed a as McCloskey suggests: “here-at-home”

Extending McCloskey’s analysis to English existentials

Is Irish ann the same as English there? • This is a tempting analysis (Moro, 1997). • McCloskey does not take a position on whether this is the right analysis for English, however (and he notes at least two hurdles in adapting the analysis of ann for English there).

Let us assume that part of the main predication in all existential propositions involves a contextually-determined element, following Francez (2007), without claiming an equivalence between ann and there.

(24)

Proposal: The predicate in an existential proposition in English is between the pivot and a predicate (LocPred) which in English is silent and contains a contextually-determined element

The operator ∩ just allows for an argument that’s a property but then type-shifts it to an entity (Chierchia 1984; Partee 1987). 1

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a. b.

Assumption: there comes as part of this predication for free (the meaning and distribution of there will not play a role in the analysis here)2 Syntactically, LocPred (like ann) is likely decomposed into a complex PP, but I will not pursue that analysis here (see Folli 2008, drawing on Talmy 1985, for promising directions).

In English, the existential predicate is LocPred rather than ann (25): (25)

There’s some wine (on the table) vP v be

SC DP some wine

LocPred

We can modify the predication further (and we often do so), but the main predication of the SC remains the one between the pivot and LocPred, as shown in (26). (26)

Further modifying SC vP

v be

SC

PP on the table

SC DP some wine

LocPred

What about the coda? If we follow Francez in analyzing codas as contextual modifiers of the output of the “bare” existential, we can give (27) as the meaning of (25). Following Francez (2007: 77), I use @ 2

See Deal (2009) and Sobin (2014) for recent discussion on there in English.

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to simply mean “applied to”. (See Francez 2007: 74ff for more discussion of codas as contextual modifiers and for a more sophisticated implementation.) (27)

ńx ( on-the-table(x) ) @ instantiate ( ∩ ńx (wine(x) & R(x, here-at-home)) )

2.4.1

Contextual anchoring through LOC

Recall: McCloskey puts context-dependence into the meaning of Irish ann in the predicate R(x, a) which is part of the instantiate function. • R(x, a) relates an individual (x) to a pronoun-like spatio-temporal location, a. I will assume that LocPred in English has basically the same denotation as ann.3 (28)

Crucially, LocPred involves a McCloskey’s predication R(x, a). a.

In other words, English existentials involve a salient function R between a contextually-determined element and an individual from the set denoted by the pivot

Existential sentences have referential anchoring built into them I will argue in the next sections that R(x, a) provides the anchoring function in a referential anchoring approach, and that the contextually-determined element a in R(x, a) is the referential anchor.

3

Referential anchoring

This section presents an approach to the interpretation of indefinites called referential anchoring (von Heusinger 2002, and following). (29)

“specificity” (von Heusinger, 2011): contrasts associated with the interpretation of indefinite DPs such as exceptional scope-taking, epistemic specificity, and discourse prominence.

3

It is likely, as McCloskey suggests, that the content of ann—and particularly the instantiate predicate—is distributed among several functional and lexical heads in English (Myler 2014 for a discussion of how have emerges in English).

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• Von Heusinger claims that in all of these cases, the indefinite is linked, or anchored, in some way to an already-given, salient discourse referent We can make use of the core insight of referential anchoring without believing that it accounts for all the phenomena that have been grouped under the term ‘specificity’. (30)

Key elements in referential anchoring i.

ii.

anchor: a salient discourse participant or referent, given to speaker and hearer • often assumed to be an attitude-holder, e.g. speaker, but it need not be (von Heusinger, 2011: 1048) anchoring function (f ): a contextually-determined relation between the anchor and the indefinite

“The content of the [anchoring] function can vary from ‘x has y in mind’ to ‘there is a natural and informative function from x to y”’ (von Heusinger, 2011: 1048)

3.1

Implementation: Parameterized choice functions

The core intuitions of referential anchoring can be cashed out in several different ways (von Heusinger, 2011: 1048). • Simple implementation: Parameterized choice functions, as explicated in Geist (2008). • Intuitively: the anchoring function f () takes the anchor as an argument and gives back a function that is custom-made for the anchor; the CF is therefore relativized to (from the perspective of) the anchor. (31)

More technically (Geist 2008: 158): a. b. c.

fx is a “contextually salient partial function from individuals to choice functions” the subscript x: “an implicit argument of the indefinite and is of type e” fx takes a set as an argument and returns an individual member of the set

The choice of anchor can result in different readings of indefinites (Geist, 2008: 158) Epistemic specificity—a toy example, based on Geist (2008): (32)

I saw a princess yesterday. Her name was Leia. anchor: speaker f(speaker) CFspeaker (princess) 10

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CFspeaker (princess)

“Leia”

Co-varying readings work the same way, except that the anchor varies with a higher quantifier (example based on Geist 2008; from Kratzer 1998, Hintikka 1986): (33)

Every child saw a princess yesterday.

(34)

∀x [ child(x) → saw( x, fx (princess) ) ] f(Tommy) CFt (princess) Leia f(Sally) CFs (princess) Myrcella f(Billy) CFb (princess) Daenerys ...

Existential sentences: One way in which existential sentences are special is that they have an anchor and anchoring function built into them; the anchoring function is a contextually-salient relation, and the anchor is a contextually-determined spatio-temporal location.

3.2

Referential anchoring: What possible anchors are there?

It is not completely clear from the referential anchoring literature what can and cannot be an anchor, and how you can tell what the anchor of any given sentence is. (35)

Anchors (von Heusinger, 2011: 1048) • •

Prototypical anchor: the speaker (often assumed to be an attitude-holder) A more abstract anchor: variable bound by a quantifier

(36)

Proposal: loc is a possible anchor

(37)

There was a princess at the window. a. b.

f speaker (princess) f loc (princess)

If speaker were always an available anchor, then the sentences in (38) should all have the same status as referent-introducers, as far as referential anchoring is concerned. (38)

a. b. c.

A princess laughed. She was beautiful. A princess kissed the unicorn. She was beautiful. A princess came in. She was beautiful. 11

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Claim • The discourses in (38) do not have the same status • The anchor in (38c) is the contextual variable that is part of the LOC predication (39)

a. b. c.

f speaker (princess) laughed.. . . f speaker (princess) kissed the unicorn.. . . f loc (princess) came in.. . .

Support • Syntax: The syntax of (38c) is crucially different from the others • Corpus results: A case study shows that sentences of the (38c) type occur with more indefinite subjects, and more referentially persistent indefinite subjects How can we distinguish between f loc and f speaker in sentences like There was a princess in the garden and A princess walked in? This is a question I am still working on.

4

Unaccusative structures

There is more than one way for a syntactic structure to be unaccusative (Moro 1997; Hale and Keyser 2002; Kural 2002; Deal 2009; Irwin 2012)

4.1 (40)

Semantic classes and unaccusative vPs Change-of-state unaccusatives (break, freeze, melt, burn) :

(41)

causative-inchoative alternation a. b.

(42)

associated in English with there-insertion

there-insertion a. b.

4

The river froze. The cold weather froze the river.

Motion/existence unaccusatives (arrive, appear, come in, pull up) :

(43)

associated with transitivity alternations (causative/inchoative)

All day long trains of pack-animals arrived. All day long there arrived trains of pack-animals.4

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010718644/

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4.1.1

Motion/existence unaccusatives: “existential unaccusatives”

Motion/existence unaccusatives have been analyzed as having a SC structure (Hoekstra and Mulder 1990; Moro 1997; Irwin 2012) (44)

Motion/existence unaccusativity: The existential unaccusative structure vP v

SC DP

XP ...

(45)

When the XP in (44) is LocPred, this structure is existential • •

SC may be headed (PredP) or it may not Keeping it a SC will maintain the parallels to McCloskey’s (2014) analysis

Sentences like those in (46) have the SC structure with LocPred as the predicate: (46)

a. b. c. d. e.

A A A A A

package arrived. princess came in. carriage pulled up. puppy bounced in. knight waltzed onto the dancefloor.

The sentences in (46) are “existential unaccusatives” • The sentences in (46) have an existential structure • This predicts that they allow there-insertion (they do) : More importantly, it predicts that they have LOC available as an anchor

4.2

The existential unaccusative structure

The existential unaccusative structure is shown in (47) • the v + root selects for a SC consisting of a “pivot” and LocPred. • Remember: LocPred is akin to Irish ann ‘in it’ and is silent in English.

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(47)

A lady waltzed in vP

v

√

SC

waltzed DP a lady

LocPred

in

Many roots other than arrive, appear can occur in this structure: • In English, the types of root that can occur in the SC structure include many manner-of-motion verbs, such as bounce, waltz, glide (roots that can also occur in unergative structures—i.e., with true external arguments); this observation goes back, of course, to Hoekstra and Mulder (1990).5 • Recall Partee et al. (2011: 138): “The verbs that may occur in existential sentences are an open class; some are independently characterizable as existential or perceptual, and others may undergo ‘semantic bleaching”’

On the current approach, all verbs are “bleached” in the sense that part of the fundamental meaning of the vP comes from the syntactic structure that a verbal root occurs in. If existential BE sentences can referentially anchor indefinites with LOC, so can existential unaccusatives • Put differently, indefinite subjects of existential unaccusative sentences can be referentially anchored in a way that the subjects of other intransitive sentences cannot. In the final sections I will present support for this claim and also discuss the question of whether a garden-variety locative PP involves a LOC predication and thereby a referential anchor. 5

And as discussed famously by Talmy (1985, 1991), this is an interesting point of contrast between English and Romance (among other languages); see Folli (2008) for a recent discussion.

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5

Case study: Probing new discourse referents with existential unaccusatives

Claims • Only intransitive sentences with an existential predication allow anchoring through LOC • Anchoring through LOC is associated with the establishment referentially persistent discourse referents

5.1

Background: Indefinite subjects in English are rare

Previous corpus work on English has shown again and again that subjects rarely have the information status “new”. (48)

“Discourse new” subjects are rare (Prince, 1981, 1992) Spoken text: 0% of subjects were new (Prince, 1981: 243) Written text: 6% of subjects were new (Prince, 1992: 316)

(49)

Indefinite subjects are rare: subject vs. object forms in the Switchboard Corpus(Francis et al., 1999)6 a. b. c.

subjects: 91% of subjects were pronominal subjects: 9% of subjects were “lexical” (full DP); only 2% of these were indefinites like a boy (Francis et al., 1999: 92) objects: 34% were pronominal (Francis et al., 1999: 86)

Why are indefinite subjects in English so rare? • If introducing an entity involves anchoring, and if speaker is always a possible anchor, then why don’t we see more indefinite subjects? • One possibility concerns the ordering of information in a sentence, the “given-new contract” (Clark and Haviland 1977: 3; Halliday 1967a,b) The given-new contract does not account for the fact that when we do see specific indefinite subjects, those sentences are existential unaccusatives. (50) 6

Anchoring of indefinite subjects through speaker appears not to be good enough to establish referential persistence

These findings are also reported in Michaelis and Francis (2007)

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(51)

5.2

In contrast to existential unaccusatives, unergatives and change-of-state unaccusative structures do not come with a contextually-determined element that can serve as an anchor.

Corpus case study

Design • Take two verbs with similar lexical frequency7 • Search for these verbs with indefinite subjects (root clauses only) • Compare frequency of indefinite subjects and subsequent reference Corpus of Contemporary American English • COCA (Davies, 2008-) • 450,000,000 word corpus • Various genres (e.g., fiction, magazines, newspapers, film scripts, spoken transcripts from TV shows) Results (52)

Comparison: arrive vs. laugh a. b.

search string (arrive): .|; a|an [n*] [arrive] -[n*] search string (laugh): .|; a|an [n*] [laugh] -[n*] lemma laugh arrive

lexical frequency 864 813

indefinite subject N 9 64

Table 1: arrive vs. laugh (53)

The few sentences with indefinite subjects of laugh do not serve to introduce discourse referents (individual), but rather laughing events • These are often scene-setting, as in sentences (2), (3), and (6) in Table 3

In contrast, there were obviously many more indefinite subjects with arrive • Not all of these subjects were subsequently referenced, however (only about 1/3 were) 7

Lexical frequency from downloaded list of 5000 most frequent words in COCA. Available at: http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp.

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sentence A chimpanzee laughs. A child laughing. A loon laughed, and my chest tightened. A woman laughed, and he stared her down. A man laughed, genuinely pleased. A hyena laughed somewhere in the night. A man laughed at me. A policeman laughed as they fished through . . . A friend laughed to see our cows frolicking. . .

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

subsequent discourse reference Yes (non-specific kind) No No Yes (non-specific) No No No No No

Table 2: Indefinite subjects: laugh contexts (laugh) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

And you can see them being happy A chimpanzee laughs. When a chimpanzee finds a group of bananas in the woods . . . Something is wrong. Then she hears it, clearly. A child laughing. The splash of water. "Oh, shit," I said, looking over the water. A loon laughed, and my chest tightened. Suddenly I became angry at myself. They were all so transparent. A woman laughed, and he stared her down. “I’m not a freak,” and she couldn’t muster a response . . . the room suddenly seemed crowded and small. A man laughed, genuinely pleased. Someone sang, I’m forever blowing bubbles. Out in Kilindini Harbor, a hippo snorted. A hyena laughed somewhere in the night. She shook her head and sighed. . . A man laughed at me. I looked around for the source of the voice but the pier A policeman laughed as they fished through the broken window for boxes of tricks. While older boys . . . A friend laughed to see our cows frolicking around the compost pile one evening. The animals enjoy. . .

Table 3: Indefinite subjects in context: laugh

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

sentence A letter arrived from the Hoerner Bank in Germany An ambulance arrived, took you to the hospital. A fax arrived at the stadium that raised Tommy’s hopes. A package arrives in the mail A guest arrives through the festooned gate. A hekcopter arrived about fifteen minutes later A whiskbot arrived the next instant A letter arrived soon after. An ambulance arrived and removed Anne’s covered corpse Table 4: Indefinite subjects: arrive

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subsequent discourse reference No No Yes Yes (non-specific) Yes No No Yes No

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contexts (arrive) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A letter arrived from the Hoerner Bank in Germany, stating that it specialized in the search RIVERA: Oh, God. An ambulance arrived, took you to the hospital. Ms-AGUILAR: Right. A fax arrived at the stadium that raised Tommy’s hopes. It was from Labor Secretary Robert A package arrives in the mail. You open it, simple enough, a part of everyday A guest arrives through the festooned gate. A girl, something of a tomboy - flannel shirt A hekcopter arrived about fifteen minutes later and whisked him off to a hospital A whiskbot arrived the next instant, and Thomas held up his foot A letter arrived soon after. Our meeting seemed to have changed him. The letter had a An ambulance arrived and removed Anne’s covered corpse. Paul noticed her oddly pale right hand,

Table 5: Indefinite subjects in context: subset of results for arrive

5.3

Discussion

Possible objection: But arrive means “coming on the scene”! • Arrive means “coming on the scene” because it occurs in the existential unaccusative structure. • Any root that can occur in the existential unaccusative structure will give similar results—e.g., manner of motion roots. Manner of motion roots • Manner of motion roots like pull or walk can occur in the existential unaccusative structure • Nothing about the core meaning of these roots denotes “coming on the scene” Initial corpus results for pull and walk (54)

pull (freq. 47) as existential unaccusative (N = 139) a. b. c.

(55)

A car pulled up . . . A runner pulls up . . . A train pulls in . . .

walk (freq. 2223) as existential unaccusative (N = 154) a. b. c. d.

A gentleman walks out . . . A woman walked in . . . A woman walks up to the lectern . . . An earwig walks across her arm . . . 18

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5.4

Further discussion: Can a locative PP anchor an indefinite in an unergative vP?

We can now see why ordinarily locative PPs do not provide a locative referential anchor. • The anchor provided by LocPred is part of the meaning of an existential predication • Ordinary locative PP adjuncts do not involve an existential predication (56)

Unergative sentence with locative adjunct a. b.

?? A princess laughed in the garden. She was beautiful. X A princess laughed in the garden. It(=the laughter) was a beautiful sound.

Garden-variety PP adjuncts are just modifiers • Recall that some stereotypically unergative (manner-of-motion) verbs can occur in an unaccusative structure with a locative argument (Hoekstra and Mulder, 1990), as in (57). • These sentences are existential unaccusatives (with LocPred), and by our analysis allow a specific interpretation for the indefinite. (57)

A princess waltzed into the ballroom. She was beautiful.

The anchor in (57) is not the DP the ballroom but an element in LocPred, just as it is with other existential unaccusative sentences. (58)

A princess waltzed into the ballroom (∃ pred between DP and LocPred) vP

v

√

SC

waltz SC

PP into the ballroom

DP

LocPred

a princess

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Conclusion

Existential sentences have a built-in anchoring function and referential anchor • This allows them to serve the special discourse function of establishing referentially persistent discourse referents. • A subset of unaccusative sentences are existential in their syntax and their meaning; these sentences therefore have an anchoring function and an anchor. • We can distinguish between f speaker and f loc by looking at asymmetries in the establishment of discourse referents by existential unaccusatives vs. other intransitives.

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