7 VP shells

In Chapter 4, we briefly mentioned the binary-branching hypothesis - the idea that syntactic nodes can have at most two daughters. At first glance, this hypothesis seems incompatible with the existence of double-object sentences in natural language, illustrated for English in (1).

(1)     Travis will give Betsey the receipts.

In such sentences, the verb is associated with three semantic arguments (agent, recipient, theme), and it looks like the recipient (Betsey) and the theme (the receipts) both need to be represented as complements of the verb (traditionally, both arguments are taken to be the verb's objects). In this chapter, we present a proposal for how to make double-object sentences consistent with the binary-branching hypothesis. The proposal hinges on the fact that ditransitive verbs like give can be semantically decomposed into a causative part and a remainder whose meaning depends on the verb in question. Some examples are shown in (2).

(2)   feed = cause to eat
  give have, possess
  lend have, possess (temporarily)
  show see
  teach learn

The decomposability of the verbs in (2) suggests deriving sentences like (1) from schematic structures like (3), where the uppercase predicates CAUSE and HAVE indicate abstract verbal heads.1

(3)    

Such lexical argument structures contain the same three arguments as the original sentence in (1), but since there are now two heads, neither of them needs to be associated with more than one complement - exactly as required by the binary-branching hypothesis. Lexical argument structures are so called because they represent the structural relations between a lexical item (that is, a word) - possibly decomposed, as in (3), into more basic elements - and that item's arguments. Lexical argument structures of the particular type in (3), which contain one VP immediately embedded within another, are also known as VP shells.

In order to motivate the VP shell treatment of double-object sentences, we begin by discussing ordinary causative sentences (ordinary in the sense that the causative verb is overt). After showing that causative verbs take a VP small clause complement, we present some striking parallels between causative sentences and double-object sentences in Japanese.

Strictly speaking, according to the VP shell analysis, there are neither double-object sentences nor ditransitive verbs. However, these terms are so well established that we will continue to use them for expository convenience. We will use the term 'ditransitive verb' to refer to verbs that can undergo a semantic decomposition as in (2), and the term 'double-object sentence' to refer to sentences containing such a verb, a recipient DP, and a theme DP.

We then turn to the details of the structure in (3); in particular, we propose that the lower verbal head adjoins to the higher one, yielding a complex verb that is spelled out depending on the semantics of the lower head. This extends an idea already introduced in Chapter 6, where we said that the combination of sing and past is spelled out as sang. In a similar way, we are saying here that the combination of CAUSE and HAVE, for instance, is spelled out as a form of give.

Having presented the core components of the VP shell analysis, we extend it to cover two other important cases in English. We first consider the variant of (1) given in (4), where the order of the recipient and theme arguments is reversed and the recipient argument is expressed by a PP rather than a DP.

We will refer to DP-PP sentences like (4) as double-complement sentences. Again, we use this term strictly for convenience, and not in order to express a structural analysis.

(4)     Travis will give the receipts to Betsey.

Finally, we discuss the relationship between the verbs in sentences like those in (5), known as the causative alternation.

(5) a.   The vase broke.
b.   The cat broke the vase.

A VP shell analysis of double-object sentences

VP shells in ordinary causative sentences

We begin our exploration of VP shells by considering ordinary causative sentences like the one in (6), where the semantic notion of CAUSE is overtly expressed by the verb let.

(6)     God let there be light.

Recall from Chapter 3 that expletive there must be licensed as the subject of a verb of existence (be in the case of (6)). It follows from this that the sequence there be light forms a small clause, a minimal instance of predication (minimal because unlike an ordinary clause, it doesn't contain any overt I element). It is this small clause that serves as the complement of let, as shown in (7).

(7) a.       b.  

The treatment of there be light as a constituent is motivated not only in syntactic terms (with reference to the licensing requirement on expletive there), but also by the intuition that let takes two semantic arguments, an agent (expressed by the matrix subject) and a situation (expressed by the small clause).

A related piece of evidence that causatives like let takes small clause complements comes from sentences like (8).

(8)     John let it slip that the president's schedule had changed.

The it in (8) is the expletive it discussed in Chapter 3, which is associated with that clauses. Like expletive there, expletive it must be a subject, and therefore the sequence it slip that ... must be a small clause.

Parallels between causative sentences and double-object sentences

In certain languages, causative sentences and double-object sentences exhibit unusual parallels that provide support for the VP shell analysis. One such language is Japanese, where the case-marking of arguments is strikingly similar in both sentence types. Case is discussed in more detail in the next chapter, but all that is important for present purposes is that different case particles in Japanese preferentially mark certain grammatical relations. Specifically, subjects are generally marked with the case particle ga, as distinct from direct objects, which are marked with the particle -o.2

(9) a.   
Taroo-ga  hasit-ta   koto
      NOM run   PAST that
'that Taroo ran'
b.   
Taroo-ga  ringo-o   tabe- ta   koto
      NOM apple ACC eat   PAST that
'that Taroo ate an apple'

Embedding a sentence under a causative verb has the following effects on case marking. When the complement sentence is intransitive, the matrix subject is marked with ga, as usual, but the subject of the complement clause is marked with o, as shown in (10). (This is comparable to what happens in English in They ran and We made them run.)

As the hyphens indicate, the causative verb -(s)ase is a bound morpheme. We return to this fact shortly.

(10)     
Hanako-ga  Taroo-o   hasir-ase- ta   koto
       NOM       ACC run   CAUS PAST that
'that Hanako made Taroo run'

Given (10), one might expect embedding a transitive sentence under a causative to lead to the case-marking pattern in (11a). The object of the lower clause is expected to be marked with o because it is an object (as in (9b)), and the subject of the lower clause is expected to be marked with o, too, by analogy to (10). (Again, this would be comparable to what happens in English in They chased him and We made them chase him.)

(11)   * 
Hanako-ga  Taroo-o   ringo-o   tabe-sase-ta   koto
       NOM       ACC apple ACC eat  CAUS PAST that 
Intended meaning: 'that Hanako made Taroo eat an apple'

As it turns out, however, the case-marking pattern in (11) is ungrammatical, violating what is known in the Japanese syntax literature as the double o constraint, which prohibits the occurrence of more than one accusative noun phrase per sentence. When a transitive sentence is embedded under a causative verb, the subject of the lower clause must be marked with a distinct case marker ni.

(12)   ok 
Hanako-ga  Taroo-ni  ringo-o   tabe-sase-ta   koto
       NOM       DAT apple ACC eat  CAUS PAST that 
'that Hanako made Taroo eat an apple'

What is of interest to us now is that the -ga -ni -o case-marking pattern in (12) recurs in double-object sentences, as shown in (13a). We underline the parallel by paraphrasing (13a) with the ordinary causative construction in (13b).

(13) a.   
Hanako-ga  Taroo-ni  hon- o   mise- ta   koto
       NOM       DAT book ACC show  PAST that
'that Hanako showed Taroo a book'
b.   
Hanako-ga  Taroo-ni  hon- o   mi-  sase- ta   koto
       NOM       DAT book ACC see  CAUS PAST that
'that Hanako made Taroo see the book'

The identical case-marking pattern is exactly what the VP shell proposal leads us to expect, since the relevant structures, given in (14), are analogous. (Bear in mind that the combination of the abstract morphemes MIRU 'see' and -(S)ASE in (14a) is spelled out as a form of miseru 'show'.)

For expository clarity, we focus on the lexical argument structures under discussion in what follows, omitting the projections of I and C that would be involved in deriving the complete sentence.

(14) a.       b.  

Verb movement

The Japanese causative exhibits a further property that is important for the VP shell analysis. Unlike the English verb let, Japanese -(s)ase is a bound morpheme. As they stand, therefore, the VP shells in the preceding section are not yet grammatical. The missing step is for the verb of the complement clause to adjoin to the causative morpheme. This V-to-V movement is motivated by the same considerations as the V-to-I movement discussed for French in Chapter 6; in both cases, a verb moves up the tree in order to "support" a bound morpheme. The result for (14b) is shown in (15).

(15)    

In view of the semantic and case-marking parallels between causative and double-object sentences, it is not unreasonable to extend the overt verb movement in (15) to the double-object case. In other words, we will assume that verb movement applies to (14a), just as it does to (14b), yielding (16) as the final VP shell for (13a).

(16)    

Finally, we assume that the VP shells for English double-object verbs are analogous to the ones that we have just motivated for Japanese. (17) shows the VP shell that we are assuming for the English counterpart of (13a). The structures in (16) and (17) differ only in the direction in which V takes complements in Japanese and English.

The reason we left-adjoin SEE to CAUS even in English is that we are treating CAUS by analogy to a suffix like -ify (cf. magn-ify, not *ify-magn).

(17)    

(18a) gives the VP shell for our original English double-object sentence, and (18b) gives the structure for the entire sentence.

(18) a.       b.  

Extending the VP shell analysis

Double-complement sentences

Many double-object sentences have a double-complement counterpart in which the order of the recipient (red) and theme (blue) arguments is reversed and the recipient is expressed as a PP rather than a DP.

(19) a.   Travis gave Betsey the receipts.
b.   Travis gave the receipts to Betsey.

At first glance, double-object sentences seem to stand in a strict one-to-one correspondence with their double-complement counterparts and to be completely synonymous with them. Indeed, early on in generative grammar, it was held than any double-complement sentence could be transformed into a double-object sentence by an operation that was known as Dative Shift. However, certain subtle semantic restrictions on the two sentence types have been observed that have led this view to be abandoned (Green 1974, Oehrle 1976, Jackendoff 1990). For instance, a recipient can be expressed as either a DP or a PP when animate, but not when inanimate.

Double-object sentence Double-complement sentence
(20) a. Travis sent Betsey the receipts. (21) a. Travis sent the receipts to Betsey.
b. * Travis sent the post office box the receipts. b. Travis sent the receipts to the post office box.

This effect is so strong that noun phrases that can be interpreted as locations in a double-complement sentence are forced into an animate interpretation in the corresponding double-object sentence. Specifically, a location noun phrase is interpreted, by metonymy, as a group of people that is associated in some way with the location.

(22) a.   Travis sent the receipts to Philadelphia. (ambiguous between location and metonymy reading)
b.   Travis sent Philadelphia the receipts. (only metonymy reading; Philadelphia = the people at the Philadelphia office)

What the facts in (20)-(22) suggest is that ascribing exactly the same thematic role (that of recipient) to the first DP in a double-object sentence and to the PP in a double-complement sentence is not quite correct. Rather, the first DP in a double-object sentence is the (prospective) possessor of the theme, whereas the PP in a double-complement sentence desigates the theme's path (expressed in terms of the path's endpoint). Accordingly, we will represent double-complement sentences by structures in which CAUSE takes a small clause complement headed by GO rather than by HAVE. The structures we have in mind are shown in (23).

(23) a.       b.  

The move we have just made is supported by the parallel between (20)-(22) on the one hand and the corresponding simple 'have' and 'go' sentences in (24) and (25) on the other.

Parallel to double-object sentence Parallel to double-complement sentence
(24) a.   Betsey has the receipts (in her possession). (25) a. The receipts went to Betsey.
b. * The post office box has the receipts (in its possession). b. The receipts went to the post office box.
c. Philadelphia has the receipts (in its possession). (only metonymy reading) c. The receipts went to Philadelphia. (ambiguous between location and metonymy reading)

Although endpoints of paths can be either locations or possessors, locations (except when interpreted metonymically) cannot be possessors. At first glance, therefore, it seems that any double-complement sentence necessarily has a double-object counterpart (though not vice versa). However, the requirement that the PP in a double-complement sentence be the endpoint of a path imposes on the DP theme in such a sentence a requirement of its own: namely, that the theme refer to an appropriate entity - one that can travel along a path. Themes in double-object sentences, on the other hand, don't need to meet this path-related requirement. This explains how there can be double-object sentences like (26), whose double-complement counterparts are awkward at best.

Double-object sentence Double-complement sentence
(26) a.   The scandal gave the reporter an idea. (27) a. ?* The scandal gave an idea to the reporter.
b. Bright lights give Amy a migraine headache. b. ?* Bright lights give a migraine headache to Amy.

Ideas and migraine headaches are not the kinds of entities that travel along paths, and so the double-complement sentences are unacceptable. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible for ideas or migraine headaches to be the result of certain causes. In English, the experiencer of an idea or a headache is treated as a possessor, and so the corresponding double-object sentences are possible. Once again, as expected, the simple 'have' and 'go' sentences in (28) and (29) are parallel to (26) and (27).

Parallel to double-object sentence Parallel to double-complement sentence
(28) a. The reporter had an idea. (29) a. ?* An idea went to the reporter.
b. Amy had a migraine headache. b. ?* A migraine headache went to Amy.

Related to the considerations just discussed explain is an observation about the pair of sentences in (30), according to which (30a), but not (30b), entails that the students actually learned syntax.3

(30) a.   The professor taught the students syntax.
b.   The professor taught syntax to the students.

This observation is consistent with our treatment, since the students in the double-object sentence bear the thematic role of possessor. In the double-complement sentence, on the other hand, knowledge is conceptualized as traveling on a path between the professor and the students, but whether the knowledge ever arrives at its intended destination is not guaranteed!

The causative alternation

The VP shell approach can easily be extended to another class of predicates in English, those that participate in the so-called causative alternation, illustrated in (31).

(31) a.   The ball dropped. ~   The children dropped the ball.
b.   The ball rolled down the hill. ~   The children rolled the ball down the hill.
c.   The boat sank. ~   The explosion sank the boat.

In the intransitive variant on the left, the verbs drop and roll designate a manner of motion, and the subject expresses a theme argument. In the transitive variant on the right, the subject is an agent (or more generally, a cause) initiating the motion, and the theme argument surfaces postverbally. These facts can easily be accounted for by assuming that the structure for the transitive variant contains the intransitive variant embedded under CAUSE, as shown in (32) and (33). For clarity, in what follows, we show the shell structures both before and after any instances of movement that apply.

(32)    
(33) a.       b.  

A particularly important subclass of intransitive predicates that participate in the causative alternation is the class of inchoative predicates, so called because they denote a change of state (in its nonlinguistic sense, 'inchoative' simply means 'incipient, beginning').

Inchoative Causative
(34) a.   The vase broke. ~   The cat broke the vase.
b.   The ice melted. ~   The sun melted the ice.
c.   The glass shattered. ~   The impact shattered the glass.

Inchoative verbs all involve the semantic primitive BECOME. For instance, inchoative break means 'become not whole/functional', inchoative melt means 'become liquid', and inchoative shatter means 'become a bunch of shards'. We can therefore represent the intransitive variant of (34b) as in (35). Embedding the structure in (35b) under CAUSE gives the structures in (36) for the transitive variant.

(35) a.       b.  
(36) a.       b.  

Notice that we allow an adjective to move and adjoin to a verb; more generally, we assume that heads are able to move and to adjoin to other heads, regardless of category.

A particularly interesting inchoative verb is get. In a sentence like (37), get can be decomposed into the inchoative component BECOME and a location component that we can call AT.

(37)     The receipts got to the post office box.

The pre- and post-movement structures for get are given in (38); what they are intended to represent is that a state of affairs comes about in which the location of the theme is identical with the endpoint of the path designated by the to phrase. (The to phrase here seems to be associated with two semantic primitives: the path itself (to) as well as the path's endpoint (AT).)

(38) a.       b.  

Like the other inchoative verbs mentioned earlier, inchoative get has a causative variant, illustrated in (39).

(39)     Travis got the receipts to the post office box.

We can derive a schematic structure for (39) by embedding (38b) under CAUSE.

(40) a.       b.  

What is unusual about get is that it allows a second inchoative use. This second inchoative get is illustrated in (41) and can be decomposed into BECOME and HAVE, as shown in (42).

(41)     Betsey got the receipts.
(42) a.       b.  

As might be expected, this get can also be embedded under CAUSE, yielding a double-object sentence, as illustrated in (43) and (44).

(43)     Travis got Betsey the receipts.
(44) a.       b.  

The four instances of get can be conveniently summarized as in (45).

(45)       Inchoative Causative
AT Destination get (38) Double-complement get (40)
HAVE Possession get (42) Double-object get (44)

As expected, double-object get exhibits the possessor restriction discussed earlier, so that (46a) is unacceptable and (46b) is unambiguous, allowing a metonymy reading, but not a location reading.

(46) a. * Travis got the post office box the receipts.
b. Travis got Philadelphia the receipts. (only metonymy reading)

Further issues

Idioms and locality

It has been traditional in generative grammar to (attempt to) impose a locality constraint on idioms along the lines of (47) (locality constraints are so called because they make reference to relatively small, or local, domains).

(47)     All parts of an idiomatic expression must together form a constituent.

The motivation for (47) is the desire to impose a formal limit on what can count as an idiom in natural language and to prevent arbitrary combinations of words and phrases from having idiomatic readings. For instance, (47) prohibits idioms like the made-up example in (48), because blue and hop don't by themselves form a constituent.

(48) a.   The blue lunch at Bitar's hops.
Intended meaning: 'The lunch at Bitar's is unusually large.'
b.   They've bred a strain of blue drosophila that hops.
Intended meaning: 'They've bred a strain of drosophila that is unusually large.'
c.   The great apes all have blue brains that hop.
Intended meaning: 'The great apes all have unusually large brains.'

In many cases, the constraint in (47) is trivially satisfied. For instance, red tape 'bureaucratic difficulties' is an NP, the Big Apple 'New York City' is a DP, and kick the bucket 'die' or let the chips fall where they may 'disregard the consequences of one's actions' are VPs. There are even idioms that consist of entire clauses, like What goes around comes around. Crucially, however, there shouldn't be any idioms consisting of discontinuous chunks. At first glance, therefore, idioms like those in (48) seem to pose a problem for the locality constraint in (47).

(48) a.   give someone the creeps 'make someone uneasy'
b.   throw someone to the wolves 'sacrifice someone'

However, just as the VP shell analysis allows us to preserve the binary-branching hypothesis in the face of apparent counterevidence in the form of double-object and double-complement sentences, it also allows us to preserve the locality constraint on double-object and double-complement idioms in (48). This is because the VP shell analysis allows to say that what is idiomatic in (48) is the small clause constituents indicated in (49).

(49) a.   CAUSE someone HAVE the creeps
b.   CAUSE someone GO to the wolves

This treatment is straightforwardly consistent with the existence of the related idioms in (50).

(50) a.   get the creeps (= BECOME HAVE the creeps)
b.   go to the wolves

In addition, since heads form constituents with their complements but not with their specifiers, the potential idioms in (51) are not possible.

(51) a. the creeps AT someone
b. the wolves HAVE someone

This elegantly explains the awkwardness or downright impossibility of (52) and (53) (on the intended idiomatic interpretations).

(52) a. * The creeps got to me. (= BECOME the creeps AT me)
b. ?* Crazy people give the creeps to me. (= crazy people CAUSE BECOME the creeps AT me)
(53) a. * The wolves have him.
b. * Oscar threw the wolves Felix. (= Oscar CAUSE the wolves HAVE Felix)

Notes

1. The idea underlying the VP shell analysis goes back to Chomsky 1955 and was taken up in Larson 1988, 1990 (see also Jackendoff 1990). The treatment in this chapter closely follows that of Harley 2002.

2. In addition to marking the grammatical relations like subject or direct object, Japanese also marks discourse functions such as topic. In Japanese main clauses, topic wa marking overrides subject ga marking. Because of this, it is customary to illustrate ga marking using subordinate clauses, as we do in what follows.

3. It should be noted, incidentally, that for some speakers, double-complement sentences do entail the arrival of the theme at the endpoint of the path. For such speakers, for instance, (30a) and (30b) are synonymous, and (i) entails not just (ii.a), but (ii.b).

(i)     Travis sent the receipts to the post office box.
(ii) a.   The receipts went to the post office box.
b.   The receipts got to the post office box.

We discuss the decomposition of get in more detail later on.

Exercises and problems

Exercise 5.1

A. Based on the analysis introduced in this chapter, why does the ambiguity in (1) between a literal and an idiomatic reading disappear in (2)?

(1) a.   The surgeon gave the patient the finger. (ambiguous between literal and idiomatic reading)
b. The patient got the finger. (ambiguous)
(2) a.   The surgeon gave the finger to the patient. (unambiguously literal)
b. The finger got to the patient. (unambiguously literal)

B. Suggest a lexical decomposition for put that is consistent with the contrast in (3).

(3) a.   Amy put the books on the shelf.
b. * Amy put the shelf the books.

Problem 5.1

Is the analysis of double-object and double-complement sentences presented in this chapter consistent with the results of the do so substitution introduced in Chapter 2?

Problem 5.2

There seem to be no ditransitive nouns, adjectives or prepositions. Suggest an explanation based on the VP shell approach presented in the chapter.