Multiple subcategorization and the ?-criterion: The case of climb

Abstract

We have successfully accounted for all the data of section 2 with the single unified entry (27). The price has been two innovations in the semantic structure of lexical items: the curly bracket notation for alternative realizations of variables, and the P operator. Each of these has been independently motivated. Returning to the general issue that motivated this study, we have maintained a strong correspondence between syntactic ϑ-positions and semantic argument positions. However, the correspondence need not be strictly one-to-one. We have seen multiple argument positions for a single ϑ-position in transitive climb, transaction verbs such as buy and sell, and possibly intransitive dress. We have also seen, possibly, that an argument may be multiply filled, once by a subcategorized phrase and once by a nonsubcategorized phrase. We have also seen that the correspondence between syntactic and semantic structure is encoded in lexical entries by means of principles more complex than seems to have been suspected. And the complexities we have found are for climb, which intuition suggests is a relatively simple item with rather transparent semantics. When we attempt to represent verbs with complicated options for sentential complementation (such as know and ask), we should expect the descriptive problems to multiply. Eventually, of course, one would like to adequately constrain the theory of syntax-semantics linkages in the lexicon. The present study should caution us, however, of the danger of applying Occam's razor too soon, thereby cutting off one's hand. This study has also provided evidence confirming Grimshaw's (1979) conclusion that syntactic and semantic conditions on lexical insertion are autonomous. Here we have ended with a lexical entry whose sole syntactic constraint is that there is a single postverbal complement. The syntactic category of the complement, however, is determined by the range of semantic categories possible in the corresponding variables. Viewed from a different angle, though, one might say that it is the availability of only one syntactic complement position that prevents both semantic variables from being expressed at once. There is nothing conceptually wrong with * Bill climbed the mountain up the ropes, in which both postverbal complements fill j-variables in (27) — it is just a syntactic fact about the English verb climb that makes it ungrammatical. To sum up, then, the subcategorization feature is not simply a projection of argument structure, as generally assumed. Rather, ϑ-structure and argument structure are better thought of as each constraining potential projections of the other. Finally, it is evident that these issues could not have been investigated without a fairly explicit theory of semantic structure like Conceptual Semantics. I hope to have provided here a taste of what syntactic theory may have missed out on, as a result of its habit of viewing semantics through the narrow window of more traditional formalizations of predicate-argument structure. I am grateful to Jane Grimshaw and David Olson for helpful discussion of this material, and to Jerrold Katz and especially another (anonymous) NLLT reviewer for many insightful comments on an earlier version. The puzzle of rent in section 4 goes back to discussions with Joe Emonds around 1966. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IST-8120403 to Brandeis University, and in part by NSF Grant BNS-7622943 to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where my initial exploration of climb took place one typically glorious day in February 1984.