Light verbs and ergatives

One way to solve all these problems in one go would be to assume that the structure of the transitive alternate of an ergative verb is as follows:

(50) vP

DP v'

Mike v VP

e DP V'

the ball V

bounce

Under this analysis, the UTAH can be maintained as each argument sits in exactly the position it should according to our previous analyses: the theme is the specifier of the main verb and the agent is the specifier of the abstract light verb. Moreover the event structure is represented in an isomorphic way with there being two parts to the syntactic structure each of which relate to the relevant sub-event.

The disadvantages of this analysis are: i) there is an empty light verb and ii) the wrong word order is predicted. The supposition of the empty verb is, of course, not a problem in itself. We have seen a number of instances of empty categories that are well justified and enable us to provide accounts for phenomena that would otherwise be mysterious. As long as we can independently justify the assumption of an empty element, given that language apparently makes use of such things, there is no problem in the assumption itself. There is both semantic and syntactic evidence of the existence of the empty light verb. We will return to the latter, but the semantic evidence is fairly obvious: the structure is interpreted as a causative and the presence of this meaning justifies the assumption of a light verb which provides it. Similarly, the presence of a

‘causer’ argument justifies the assumption of a predicate which assigns the relevant

-role. As there is no such visible predicate which can do such things in (48b) our conclusion is that this predicate is ‘invisible’.

But how can we even consider (50) as a possible analysis when it obviously gets the word order wrong? The thing to remember is that what we are discussing here is the organisation of the VP at D-structure and we know that things tend to move about before we get to S-structure. Thus, if there is a plausible movement analysis which will re-arrange things so that the right word order is achieved at S-structure, then this objection will have been answered. The obvious way to achieve the correct word order would be to have the verb move to the light verb position:

(51) vP

DP v'

Mike v VP

bounce₁ v DP V' e the ball V

t₁

The analysis claims that the main verb moves to adjoin to the empty light verb. This is a perfectly possible movement given what we know about other movements. The movement is neither too far, violating bounding conditions, nor in violation of the Projection principle by changing lexically stated information. The movement is also structurally preserving in the way that adjunction is structurally preserving.

Of course, showing something to be a possible movement and showing it to be an actual movement are two different things. In order to justify the movement analysis in (51) we might consider a similar construction in Hungarian. Consider the following:

(52) a legurította a labdát

down-rolled-3.s the ball-acc ‘he rolled the ball down’

b a labda legurult the ball down-rolled (53) a építette a házat

built-3.s. the house ‘he built the house’

b a ház felépult

‘the house (became) built’

(54) a elmozdította a dobozt away-moved-3.s. the box-acc ‘he moved the box’

b a doboz elmozdult ‘the box moved’

(55) a gépesítette a mez gazdaságot mechanised-3.s. the farmland ‘he mechanised the farmland’

b a mez gazdaság gépesült

‘the farmland (became) mechanised’

As we see in these examples, Hungarian has a similar alternation with a set of

‘change of state’ verbs. Moreover, the transitive versions all have a causative reading, just like the English examples we have been looking at. The interesting point is that the Hungarian causative verbs have a special form with the morpheme ít indicating causative:

(56) pre-verb stem causative tense agreement

le- gur -ít -ot -ta

(fel-) ép -ít -et -te

el- mozd -ít -ot -ta

gépes -ít -et -te

Putting aside the issue of tense and agreement inflections, it is possible to give a very similar analysis of the Hungarian causative verbs to the one we proposed for English causatives, with a causative light verb introducing the causative interpretation and the agent subject:

(57) vP

DP v'

( ) v VP

-ít DP V'

a labdát V

gur

The difference between English and Hungarian, however, is that the causative element is not phonologically empty in Hungarian. The ít morpheme, however, is a bound morpheme, which means that it must attach to some appropriate stem, i.e. a verb, and this is the trigger for the movement:

agent

theme

(58) vP

DP v'

( ) v VP

gur1 v DP V'

-ít a labdát V

t1

Thus the main verb stem moves to the causative light verb morpheme in order to bind it. The product of the movement would obviously have to undergo further morphological processes in order to show the appropriate tense and agreement forms, but this is unimportant for the point being made here. Suppose English works in exactly the same way as this. The English causative light verb is a bound morpheme, though a phonologically null one, and differs only in this way from the non-null causative make. Thus it must be attached to the main verb and this happens by the main verb moving to adjoin to it. This would then give us an independent motivation for the movement of the verb.