Abstract
This article investigates the syntactic and semantic relationship between the unselected object and the unergative verb in examples like Mary waltzed John around the room. Current consensus holds that this sentence involves resultative secondary predication, so that it is structurally equivalent to resultatives like Mary sang her throat hoarse. Yet it is well known that the waltz vs. sing verb phrase structures do not have the same argument or event structural interpretations. Notably the object with waltz seems to be an agent, while the object with sing is a patient or theme. Previous studies propose lexical rules of composition associated with waltz to specify the “special” interpretation of its object. In this article I show that the waltz object is not formally agentive, but has (what I call) an in motion interpretation. I further show that the waltz and sing verb phrases have different syntactic structures: the waltz verb phrase is transitive, and is not resultative. I argue that the contrast in interpretation between the object of waltz and sing (and the other differences in these clauses) follows from this structural difference, and that a lexical approach overgenerates. I conclude that the interpretation of the waltz object accords with regular rules of syntax-semantics correspondence.
Highlights
The subset of intransitives that canonically appear with a single agentive external argument, such as sing and waltz, are traditionally referred to as unergative
A common view is that unergatives are stable in their intransitivity, an observation often attributed to the simple activity these verbs name (e.g. Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995: 110)
Making use of a framework in which descriptive notions such as “unergative”, “transitive”, and “verb” are teased apart into their component syntactic pieces, I argued that when manner of motion roots like WALTZ appear in transitive argument structure syntax, the root modifies a complex verbal structure; and it is in relation to this complex structure that the object is interpreted
Summary
The subset of intransitives that canonically appear with a single agentive external argument, such as sing and waltz, are traditionally referred to as unergative. This work says that both verb phrases in (2) are resultatives, in which the direct object is a semantic and syntactic dependent of the resultative secondary predicate. I argue these objects are instead syntactic and semantic arguments of more complex verbal structures. This new analysis has broader implications for the determination of the apparently exceptional interpretation of objects in sentences like (2b). Folli & Harley (2006) argue for an implementation in which roots belong to formal classes, organized by a feature calculus: the SWIM / WALTZ class bear formal features that specify the relevant agentive interpretation of the object; the LAUGH / SING class do not have those features, and so the object of a sing verb is interpreted by regular mapping.
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