Predicate Raising and dative in French and sundry languages †

Abstract

Abstract The rule of Predicate Raising (PR) was first proposed by McCawley (1968b) for the prelexical syntax of English causative verbs, such as kill. Chomsky (1972a, ‘Some empirical issues in the theory of transformational grammar’) pointed out that this rule lacked syntactic support. This chapter shows that, while that may be true for English, it is not for French. French provides evidence of the strongest kind that PR is a rule of French syntax. An analysis of certain French verbs shows that the rules relating these verbs to their semantic analyses must be closely interwoven with the rules of French syntax. It also appears that, contrary to superficial evidence, the dative in French originates regularly from the subject of a transitive S which is embedded, usually, under a verb of causing or letting. Through Predicate Raising this subject is raised to the higher S to find itself as a bare NP between the higher subject and its own sister object. Evers (1971) proposes PR for Dutch and German. Langacker (1973; circulated in 1970) provides evidence for a few Uto-Aztecan languages. Starosta (1971) gives data of morphological causative constructions in Sre and Tagalog which strongly suggest PR (which is, however, rejected by Starosta for lack of syntactic motivation). Instead, Starosta introduces a new category of non-syntactic, purely lexical ‘derivational rules’, whereby new lexical items can be morphologically derived from others. It is maintained in this chapter that lexicalist solutions such as Starosta’s leave much unexplained which is, in fact, predictable if PR is accepted as a syntactic rule. Starosta’s theory is rejected mainly because it deprives general linguistic theory of an obvious generalization and thereby of a means of further restricting the notion of ‘possible grammar of a natural language’.