164 7 Adjectives, gradience, implicature
that it is the agent that causes the food to get into their mouth (maybe someone is feeding them), but that food somehow gets located in the agents mouth and swallowed by them is a feature under any definition. We highlight three aspects of the definition: that it makes reference to=agtand=pat; that it involves a coercive aspect: whatever is the patient, it isby definitionfood; and that it involves temporal marking.
Recall from3.2that our primary tool for handling temporal constraints arebefore andafter: for examplemove is given as the conjunctionbefore(=agt at place), move
after(=agt at other(place)). Here the motion element is the movement of food into the mouth, and more important, theswallowingwhich moves it from mouth through throat to stomach: =agt cause_ {=pat[move]}, after(=pat in swallow
stomach), =pat in mouth, =pat in throat, =agt has stomach,
=agt has mouth, =agt has throat.
Next, let us consider kill =agt cause_ =pat[die], which displays two of kill
these three verbal features, but not coercion. It is true thatdie means after(=agt die
[dead]) and dead means still, lack live, before(live), so kill im-dead
pliesthat the object of killing was live before, but it is not evident that such a chain of implications is truly coercive, e.g. that fromthe lawyers killed the proposalor fromJohn killed the time chainsmoking we actually conclude that the proposal or the time were alive before the action took place. This is in contrast to the implicatives likedarethat we will turn to shortly: whatever is the object ofdare, it is by definition dangerous.
Finally, let us consider see perceive, ins_ eye. Here there is no temporal see
marking, no coercion, and the linkers are brought in only by a deductive chain, via per-ceive know, ins_ sense, hear is_a, smell is_a, see is_a, ..., perceive
which brings inknow, which in turn is defined by making explicit reference to=agtand know
=patas=agt has information, information connect =pat. None of the three verbal characteristics we started out with are directly manifest, making this a lexical entry that is neutral betweensee, seeing,andsight. Thehasappearing at the end of the deductive chain is worth special attention, since it is one of the handful irreducible binaries (see Rule 15 in1.6), which must, on any theory of semantics, be treated as rela-tional. There is no act of possession that does not involve both a possessor and an object possessed, and this clearly goes back toperceive, for which again both agent and patient are obligatory.
On the one hand, see is obviously a verb of perception, and one cannot perceive without perceiving something, since the act relates some qualia, the object, to some mental state of the subject. On the other,seehas many intransitive uses, ranging from a patient recovering their eyesight after surgeryI can see again!to simple assentI see which has at best a dummy zero object. Whether the object truly percolates up from the possessed information through know and perceiveis unclear. In the case of assent, we have good reason to suppose that it was the information conveyed by the speech of the first speaker that the second speaker now acknowledges to have, but it the case of eyesight it is not at all evident what information is relevant.
7.3 Implicature 165
After these preparations let’s turn to some typical implicative verbs. The lexicon defines dareas ‘to be brave enough to do something difficult or dangerous’ (Cambridge Dictio-nary of English); ‘to be brave enough to do something that is risky or that you are afraid to do’ (Longman); ‘to have enough courage or confidence to do something, to not be too afraid to do something’ (Merriam-Webster). This is a special case of the general analysis that Karttunen (2014) offers for the whole class of verbs: ‘overcoming an obstacle’ with the obstacle being fear fordare,indifference for bother, empathy for Finnishhennoa, which he illustrates withHennoitko tappaa kissan?‘Did you overcome your pity to kill the cat?’, akin to ‘overcome your fear’ fordare.
John dares VPis taken to meanJohn does VPin conjunction withVP is risky, and for the moment we leave open the issue whether it’s risky for John, or really risky for everybody. What we did here was to incorporate a hidden element, ‘object being risky’
for dare, ‘object being boring’ or ‘subject being indifferent’ for bother, and ‘subject being humane’ forhennoa. It is helpful here that vector semantics is detached from part of speech, and we make no distinction between the adjectiverisky, the V’is risky, and the noun risk, but this lack of morphosyntactic typing will not be relied on heavily in what follows, except for making it easier to draw the graphs and talk about their nodes.
Let us consider how an ordinary sentence, such asJohn dared to criticize the mayor will be analyzed. The matrix verb is dare and it is John who does the daring, so we haveJohnÐ1 dare, and it is also John who does the criticizing, so we haveJohnÐ1 criticize. How the subject equi is effected during the parsing process is something we leave to the phenogrammar, the point here is that few grammarians (including LFGers who would use an XCOMP here) would seriously doubt that the subject of both verbs is the sameJohn. The object of the criticism is no doubt themayor, and the object of daring is the entirecriticizing the mayor.
JohnOO oo DARE
CRITICIZE @ //mayor
Figure 1.John dared to criticize the mayor
As we said,dare is_a overcome, and whoever daresactuallyhas power, or at least he thinks he does, to overcomerisk. In fact, we can rely on a dictionary definition ofbravery, courage as ‘power to overcome risk’ or ‘power to overcome fright caused by risk’, or even ‘power to overcome one’s own fright caused by risk’. Neither the final cause nor the precise application site of the power ends up being very relevant for the task at hand, which is to explain certain implications, whose non-fulfillment makes sentences usingdareinfelicitous, but not outright false. Withcriticizing the mayorit is rather clear that mayors are powerful people, and criticizing the powerful is dangerous. But when we say
166 7 Adjectives, gradience, implicature
#John dared to chew gum (7.4)
we need to abductively infer some theory that makes chewing gum dangerous. Perhaps John had throat surgery, and the wounds haven’t quite healed. Perhaps he is in the pres-ence of some superior who considers this disrespectful. Perhaps he was told the gum could be laced with poison. There are many theories that would make the use ofdare felicitous, and we need not choose among them. But we do need to draw the implication fromdaretoriskordanger. As withobstacleversusdifficultyabove, we need not be very precise which of these terms is operative here. What matters is the se-mantic concept, defined both forriskanddangeras can/1246(harm), not the risk
danger (English) printname we assign to the concept.
A significant advantage of relying on such hidden conditions on=agtand=patis that they all fit in the category ofdifficulty. As a result, they will participate in a larger frame involvingvirtue overcome difficulty. The virtue, be itbravery as in the Cambridge and Longman dictionaries, orcourage/confidence, as in Merriam-Webster, comes for free here, in that bravery, diligence, or decency are obviously virtues, This may even be made part of their lexical definition, but we will not pursue the matter here for the following reason. It is plausible that it is a piece of lexical knowledge that fear is a difficulty (an obstacle, as Karttunen (2014) has it), but this does not work for the other cases: it is rather unlikely thatindifferenceorempathyare lexically speci-fied for genusdifficulty/obstacle. Such a conclusion, if not available lexically, must somehow be derived by a process of typecasting. The essence of the force-dynamic analysis is thatdareandhennoabothis_a overcome. There is every reason to sup-pose thatovercomesubcategorizes for apowersubject and anobstacleobject. To make some action an instance ofovercome, its subject must be typecast topowerand its object toobstacle. Thatvirtueis_apoweris hard to deny, and by transitivity ofis_awe can treat all implicative subjects under this heading. With the implicative objects, this is less trivial:empathygets to be an obstacle only becausehennoais_aovercome, and outside this frame we cannot draw the usual conclusions, e.g. that obstacles are bad things and therefore being humane is a bad thing.
For dare we can use a lexical entry do, =agt[brave], =pat[danger]
dare
which includes the selectional restriction on the object that it is dangerous. Similarly, the object ofdeignis low status (or perhaps the subject is high status), that ofremember is hard to memorize, and so on.Manage has an object that is simply difficult, manner unspecified. Since it is the relationship of the subject to the object that is getting char-acterized by the implicative verb, we often have a choice between alternative framings:
e.g. withdeignwe may be describing (i) the subject as high status; (ii) the object as low status; or (iii) the subject as higher status than the object. These alternatives are logi-cally equivalent, since by default things are neither high nor low status. Yet it is quite conceivable that different speakers have different lexical entries fordeign, and different lexicalization options may play differently with negation. Translational near-equivalents in different languages may also differ only in the choice between (i)-(iii).
7.3 Implicature 167
In the algebraic theory, what implicative verbs bring to the table (working memory) are little lexically prespecified hypergraphs that demand abductive inferencing (type-casting) over and above the normal inferencing process, We assume, as is standard, that verbs can subcategorize for their arguments. To reuse an example fromS19 4.2, “elapse demands a time interval subject. If we read thatA sekki elapsedwe know that this must refer to some time period even if we don’t know the details of thesekkisystem.” This is part and parcel of knowing whatelapsemeans: people who can’t make this inference are not in full possession of the lexical entry. In the representation ofelapsethere is thus a direct prespecification=agt[period], which contrasts with the prespecification in-herited from a nominative that subjects are agentive (active, causing, volitional).
There is little reason to suppose that time intervals are inherently active, that they causally contribute to their own elapsing. To the contrary, time periods are abstract ob-jects and will inherit several features of these, in particular lack of volition and lack of physical capabilities, which are hard to square with agentivity. But oncesekkiappears in the subject slot ofelapse, itis_a periodand the inheritance of non-volitionality from any supercategory of abstract objects is blocked, since the specific, lexically prespecified case will block the general inheritance mechanism as a matter of course. Similarly, in the representation ofdare, the object of daringis_a risk, and this will block the general assessment that e.g. chewing gum is not normally considered a risk.
Another aspect of the analysis that is relatively easy in the framework presented here is adding overcoming to the small set of preexisting force dynamic primitives letting, hindering,andhelping. We can dispense with the force-dynamic diagrams en-tirely in favor of analytic statements such asovercome‘the agent, initially weaker than the object, is subsequently stronger’. In 4lang we can saybefore(force(=pat er_ =agt)), after(force(=agt er_ =pat)). As usual, it matters but little whether we call the basis of the comparison force, power, might, heft, momentum, or something else, there is a single concept here, and we chose to call it force mainly to make clear our indebtedness to Talmy (1988) and Jackendoff (1990). As a matter of fact,
the4langofforce power, and that ofpoweras cause_ changeworks reasonably force power well for the naive physics we assume throughout, very much including the
‘metaphori-cal’ cases likeThe rain forced them to seek shelterorShe changed his mind by force of thought.
Putting this all together, in7.4we start from highly skeletal lexical entries such as for dare, which stipulates only that this is an actdoand some selectional restrictions
=agt[brave], =pat[danger] and obtain, by simple algebraic means, implica-tions such as John chewed gumandchewing gum was risky (for John). This inferenc-ing is accomplished by the same process, substitutionsalva veritate, our rule of expan-sion (Rule 1 in1.6). In the subject position we obtain=agt has brave. Now what
aboutbrave? Substituting the definitionwill er_ fearyields ‘subject has greater brave willpower than fear’ and it is by yet another substitution, that fear is not just any old fear sensation, but sensation, danger cause_, <anxiety> that we finally
de-168 7 Adjectives, gradience, implicature
rive the conclusion that the object ofdareis indeed dangerous, with the danger being the same instance that appears on the lexical prespecification of the object.
As in many parts of the lexicon, there can be serious disagreement over how much of this is precomputed and already stored in the lexicon, see e.g. Pinker and Prince (1988), and defending one analysis over the other would take as far afield from the central claim, that this weak (proto)logic calculus is sufficient for deriving the meaning of the whole 7.4from the meanings of its parts, and further, that the semantics directly accounts not just for the strict meaning that John chewed gum, but also for the ‘pragmatic’ portion that this was dangerous/took courage.