Abstract
-Er nominals usually obey the External Argument Generalization: the argument of the nominal receives the thematic role that the verb assigns to its external argument. I argue that this syntactic generalization, as well as the exceptions to it, can be explained by semantics.
Specifically, -er nominals usually express properties that are inherent in the subject; I argue that they therefore belong to the class of expressions that express such properties—dynamic modals. Crucially, dynamic modals are subject oriented; hence, the proposal that -er nominals are dynamic modals naturally provides an account of the External Argument Generalization.
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Notes
A case in point is the suffix -ee; we will discuss it briefly in Sect. 5.3 below.
As is well known, there are readings of -er nominals that are clearly not related to habituals, such as (i).
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(i)
John is a goner.
We will return to such examples in Sect. 5.2 below.
-
(i)
One would perhaps expect to look for scope ambiguities as a case for the quantificational nature of habituals. However, this would not be a useful test, since habituals (and -er nominals) are generated by type-shifting, hence are restricted to narrow scope only (Cohen 2013).
To be fair to Carlson, we should note that he actually uses this argument in exactly the opposite direction: because he believes -er nominals are not quantificational, he argues that habituals are not quantificational either. But as we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that habituals are quantificational.
See also Hacquard (2011).
There are even some, like an anonymous reviewer, who question the results of the in virtue of test and the unaccepatability of sentences like (13c). Such judgments are also plausibly due to a reinterpretation of the dynamic modal as a circumstantial one.
There is some debate whether middles have no external argument, or whether the external argument exists but is implicit, but it is uncontroversial that the subject is not it.
And there are languages, e.g. Dutch, where such counterexamples abound and appear quite productive (Booij 2002).
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Cohen, A. A semantic explanation for the External Argument Generalization. Morphology 26, 91–103 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-016-9281-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-016-9281-8