Abstract
It can seem obvious that whatever verb meanings are, they vary along a dimension that can be described in terms of valence, adicity, or Frege’s metaphor of saturation. I urge a different view, according to which verbs, along with nouns, are instructions for how to access uniformly monadic concepts that can be conjoined with others. Adopting this perspective—especially in the context of Chomsky’s conception of human languages as biologically instantiated procedures—leads to an attractive but nonstandard conception of how words and the process of lexicalization are related to human thought.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I take concepts to be composable mental symbols of a special sort; see Margolis and Laurence (1999), especially their introduction. In Fregean terms, starting with arrived(Caesar) and abstracting away from the specific content of Caesar yields the monadic concept arrived(x). Starting with saw(Caesar, Brutus) and abstracting away from the contents of both saturating concepts yields the dyadic concept saw(x, y). I assume that concepts have contents, which need not be linguistic meanings. I follow the usual conventions of using small capitals to indicate concepts, with variables (“x,” “y,” …) indicating the number and logical order of saturaters: saw(Caesar, Brutus) implies that Caesar saw Brutus; saw(x, Brutus) is a monadic concept that applies to anything that saw Brutus, while saw(Caesar, y) is a monadic concept that applies to any entity that Caesar saw. But as discussed below, I do not assume that the contents of unsaturated concepts are functions, or that arrived(Caesar) denotes the value of some function with Caesar in its domain.
- 3.
I assume that talk of lexical items expressing concepts is to be understood, eventually, in terms of how concepts are indicated in speech and/or accessed in comprehension. But I do not assume that each lexical item λ is paired with a single concept C: if only because of polysemy, and the possibility of different perspectives on the things thinkers think about, a speaker might indicate one concept with a word that fetches a related but distinct concept in a hearer. For me, saying that λ expresses C is a simple way of saying that λ is linked, in a special indicating/fetching way, to one or more concepts that share a certain form and perhaps a common root; see Sect. 2.2.
- 4.
- 5.
But if events of arriving are not independent of arrivers, no value of the variable in arrive(e, Brutus) is independent of Brutus, and so arrive(e, x) is not a concept of a genuine relation. Compare after(e, f), above(x, y), and arrive-at(t, x), whose first variable ranges over times, which are independent of arrivers. Likewise, while see(e, x, y) is formally triadic, the corresponding relation does not hold among three independent entities. In this sense, hypothesizing that verbs indicate concepts like arrive(e, x) and see(e, x, y)—as opposed to arrived(x) and saw(x, y)—adds one to the posited adicities, allowing for adverbial modification of event variables, without changing much else.
- 6.
If the adverbial phrases correspond to conjuncts of a complex monadic concept, closed by existential quantification, the valid inferences are instances of conjunction reduction: ∃e[Φ(e) & Ψ(e) & Δ(e)] implies ∃e[Φ(e) & Ψ(e)], which implies ∃e[Φ(e)]. But an instance of ∃e[Φ(e) & Ψ(e) & Δ(e)] & ∃e[Φ(e) & Γ(e) & Θ(e)] need not imply ∃e[Φ(e) & Ψ(e) & Θ(e)] or ∃e[Φ(e) & Δ(e) & Γ(e)]. See Taylor (1985), expounding an argument due to Gareth Evans. The example also shows that values of event variables are not ordered n-tuples consisting of participants and a moment in time; a sharp hit (of y by x) with a red stick can occur at the same time as a soft hit with blue stick.
- 7.
Or perhaps ∀e∀x[poke(e, x, y) ≡ poke(e, y) & agent(e, x)]; where poke(e, y) applies to event–pokee pairs (cp. Kratzer 1995, but also note 9 below). See Parsons (1990) on “subatomic” semantics. Schein (1993, 2001) extends arguments for “thematic separation” to plural constructions; see also Pietroski (2005) on action descriptions, including causative and serial verb constructions. Note that while thematic concepts are formally dyadic, like after(e, f) and above(x, y), the corresponding relation does not hold between independent entities; cp. note 5.
- 8.
By contrast, (20) has a more permissive construal; cp. “There is something that Caesar ate.” So perhaps “eat” can express ingest(e) or refuel(e), and that for whatever reason, a covert direct object forces the second choice. Perhaps events of ingestion are represented as having agents and patients, without any necessary connection to nourishment, while events of refueling need not be represented as having patients.
- 9.
Again, see Parsons (1990) and Schein (1993, 2001). One can say that (31) has a covert direct object, and that it means something like “The baby did a kick”; cp. Hale and Keyser (1993). But if anything, this supports the idea that “kick” expresses kick(e) in both (31) and (32). And if one has already posited the concept kick(e, y), one might use it to introduce a monadic concept of events: ∀e{kick(e) ≡ ∃y[kick(e, y)]}. Kratzer (1996) offers a few reasons for not going this far, and instead leaving themes/patients semantically “unsevered” from verbs that apply to pairs of events and their “internal” participants; see note 7. But Williams (2007) argues that Kratzer’s arguments are not decisive for English, and that they seem less plausible for Igbo and Mandarin.
- 10.
I am indebted to Norbert Hornstein for a series of conversations on these topics.
- 11.
See also note 1. But I have no firm commitments about any particular example. It is very hard to know the adicity of any prelexical concept. Even the classically monadic “mortal” may express a concept that relates individuals to events of death. Indeed, this should make us wary of hypotheses according to which some feature of verbs matches the adicity of the concept expressed. How does one tell if such a hypothesis is correct, absent a reliable independent means of discerning the relevant conceptual adicity?
- 12.
This is an instance of a more general idea: P-concepts may exhibit certain formal distinctions that L-concepts do not; L-concepts may, by design, abstract away from certain respects in which P-concepts differ. For example, each P-concept may be essentially singular or essentially plural, while at least many L-concepts are neither; see Pietroski (2006), drawing on Boolos (1998), and Schein (1993).
- 13.
Note that “Cats and dogs rained down on Rome” does not have the idiomatic meaning of “It rained cats and dogs in Rome,” which is roughly that it rained heavily in Rome. One might argue that “snow” expresses snow(e, l), with a variable for locations. But even if this is correct, it is little comfort to saturationists. For unlike the variable for the fallen in fall(e, x), the location variable is not saturated by the concept expressed with any argument of the verb. We can say “Snow fell” and “Rome fell,” but not “Rome snowed.” And if one insists that “It snowed” has a covert saturating location argument, as opposed to a covert conjoining location adjunct, one needs appropriate analyses of (46) and (47).
- 14.
- 15.
A similar point applies to acquisition. We must ask if the faculty that supports the acquisition of languages that allow for complex names—names composed of lexical proper nouns and overt determiners—also supports the acquisition of “singular” names. For example, in Greek, names may and typically must be complex: a bare proper in a context like (51) is anomalous, like (52) in English; see Giannakidou and Stavrou (1999). Any child can acquire a “G(reek)-style” language. And if languages like English allow for lexical singular names, any child can acquire such an “E-style” language; in which case, experience with E-style languages must differ from experience with G-style languages, in a robust way that leads every normal child to acquire a lexicon of the right sort: in cases of acquiring English, a lexicon with enough entries, despite homophony and the possibility of complex-name analyses that would shorten the lexicon; in cases of acquiring Greek, a lexicon with fewer entries, despite the possibility of ambiguity and lexical-name analyses that would lengthen the lexicon. Usually, children treat lexical sounds as ambiguous only given reason to do so. So what would lead children to conclude that English name sounds are ambiguous? One can conjecture that not hearing the determiner, in examples like (51), lets children know that English has singular names. But on this view, children use “negative” evidence to disconfirm that English names are complex; and the use of such evidence in acquisition remains unattested (see Crain and Pietroski 2001). Worse, an unwanted lexical type must be posited to allow children to use negative evidence to acquire a grammar that admits theoretically superfluous ambiguities.
- 16.
- 17.
This leaves room for the externalist idea that interpretations are individuated by features of the environment (see, e.g., Burge 1989), even if these interpretations are themselves concepts; cp. Pietroski (2006, 2008) for discussion drawing on Chomsky (2000). And of course, the point is not to deny that humans can have languages of thought that are independent of public signals. But these languages may be neither acquired nor distinctively human.
- 18.
My thanks to the conference organizers and participants for very helpful discussions.
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Pietroski, P. (2015). Lexicalizing and Combining. In: de Almeida, R., Manouilidou, C. (eds) Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10112-5_2
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