There’s a bit of an infelicity in the description of the first task on the homework assignment. I think it makes sense if you back away and look at the homework more holistically, but if you’re going through it sequentially there might be a little bit of confusion.

The phrase in question is: “You have exactly two to do. Survival is almost guaranteed.” This comes at the end of the first task, but in fact what I’m talking about there is that you have essentially the same, tedious thing to do for task #1 (“Agreement with Perf”) and for task #2 (“Matching after Merging T”). What I was highlighting by my comment is that you should just accept the fact that I have asked you to do a tedious thing, and be heartened by the fact that I have not asked you to do more than two tedious things.

Just above the first task (“Agreement with Perf”), I give an explicit example of what I think the answer of tasks 1 and 2 should look like. It is a list of bullet points, corresponding to a concrete case of the definition of “Agree” from the handout.

Incidentally, the “handout 8b” referred to in problem 3 is really “handout 10” (this was a leftover reference from a previous semester).

Ok, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a few things that I should really highlight/say/repeat before you hand in the homework #5. It was supposed to be due tomorrow, and you’re free to hand it in tomorrow, but I’m not going to consider it late until after Tuesday (you have a 1-class extension on it if you want it).

Homework #5 is now due on November 1 instead.

(It is possible to do it with what we’ve already covered, but I think it will be less stressful if I remind you of a couple of things that are useful, and show you a couple of things you’d otherwise have had to deduce.)

To follow up the post I made just a few minutes ago, about the difference between Jimmy punches and Jimmy punched Bobby and what θ-roles are involved, let me say one other thing about that.

We probably want to assume that the verb punch means something, and means something stable. And probably this basic meaning of punch is indeed transitive, with an Agent and a Theme.

It “feels” like the wrong way to go to suppose that English just has two different verbs that sound like punch, one of them being transitive and describing a particular type of contact between Agent and Theme, and another one that just describes the performance of a particular type of arm motion.

It is probably not an accident that the “intransitive” meaning of punch, describing a particular kind of arm-moving event, is related to the kind of arm-movement used in the “transitive” meaning of punch. Moreover, it’s possible to do this kind of “detransitivization” with a great many transitive verbs (e.g., Jimmy eats, Jimmy paints), and it can’t be an accident that it always seems to retain a basic aspect of the meaning but lose its connection to any Theme.

What this leads us to is an analysis under which there is some way to derive the intransitive form from the transitive form. That is, punch in Jimmy punches is the transitive form punch plus some systematic (grammatical) modification that severs the Theme.

This is a little bit like what the passive does, and we’ll talk about the passive after the midterm. But briefly, if you have the active sentence Jimmy punched Bobby, the passive version would be Bobby was punched. What the passive does is remove the Agent from a transitive verb, and make it intransitive. With the passive, there is some visible morphology that goes along with it: the verb shows up in a participle form, and the verb be is used.

To account for Jimmy punches, we might want to say something similar, although this isn’t really going to be something we spend any time analyzing specifically in this class. The transformation of a transitive verb into an intransitive verb that is accomplished by removing the Theme is sometimes called an “antipassive,” where the other difference between passives and antipassives is that there is no audible indication (in English) that it has happened.

English does allow this sort of “inaudible transformation” in other cases. Probably the easiest one to see is in the use of nouns as verbs. In some cases, to turn a noun into a verb requires adding a suffix: glory → glorify. But it’s often comprehensible (and in many, many cases has become a regular part of the language) to simply verb a noun, as in: I sent Mary an email → I emailed Mary. Often we assume, parallel to glorify, that there’s a silent “verbing suffix” that converts email (N) to email (V). Given that, it might not be so crazy to think that there could also be a silent “antipassivization” suffix that converts punch (transitive) to punch (intransitive).

At least some of you have noticed (and talked to me about) the fact that it isn’t always all that straightforward to figure out whether a verb is transitive or intransitive—and by extension how many θ-roles it has.

There does appear to be a little bit of “squishiness” in this, so let me say how I would approach it, and comment about of a couple of verbs in particular.

What makes this somewhat tricky is that English is kind of flexible and forgiving in what it lets you do with verbs. Sometimes you can turn transitive verbs into intransitive verbs, sometimes it seems that you can leave “required” arguments unpronounced (which of course raises the question of what it means to be “required”).

For example, punch. This is pretty clearly a verb that really likes to be transitive, with an Agent (the puncher) and a Theme (the punchee).

Yet, consider: Little Jimmy is a really badly behaved kid. He punches.

This is kind of saying something else. It really removes the sense of the punch-recipients from the sentence. What we’re talking about is Jimmy engaging in a punching activity, not talking about a particular punching event. (In fact, maybe Jimmy just stands in a room by himself and makes punching gestures into the air.) Given this difference in meaning, I would say that in Jimmy punched Bobby, punch has both an Agent and a Theme, and had the two [uN] features that brings this about. But in Jimmy punches, there is just an Agent—Jimmy punches is kind of like Jimmy swam.

The conclusion I draw from this is that what determines what’s required is deeply intertwined with the meaning of the verb. It’s the meaning that is either transitive or intransitive. So, at the very least, this means that in order to really decide what θ-roles a verb has, you need to consider it in the context of the actual sentence you are analyzing.

As if that weren’t bad enough, there are other cases that I think are best analyzed as cases where there is, e.g., a required Theme, but one that can nevertheless be left unpronounced. So, it’s “required” by the meaning, and it is there in the syntactic tree, but it isn’t in the sentence you say. An example of this might be give in this case: I gave to the charity.

This doesn’t really mean ‘I engaged in a giving activity with the charity as a Goal’, it means I gave money to the charity. It’s not a good way to describe an event of giving cookies to the charity, or giving used pencils to the charity. There’s just something canonical enough about this situation that you’re allowed to leave “money” unsaid.

One possible test of this is to see if you can refer back to the allegedly unpronounced argument with a pronoun: I gave to the charity, but it was only half as much as the heating bill. The it here refers to the money, successfully. Compare this to one of the cases where there allegedly isn’t a Theme at all, like: Jimmy punches. It sounds quite wrong to say: Jimmy punches, and they cry. The pronoun they can’t refer back to the people that Jimmy might have been punching. The difference between the two could be attributed to there being a real, but unpronounced argument, of give in I gave to the church, but no unpronounced argument in Jimmy punches.

Subtle and interesting. I will strive to use only clear examples where possible, but it is worth being aware of some of the complexities involved in determining what θ-roles (and thus what uninterpretable features) you assume for verbs.