Causation, Permission, and Transfer: Argument realisation in GET, TAKE, PUT, GIVE and LET verbs PDF
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Causation, Permission, and Transfer Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS) issn 0165-7763 his series has been established as a companion series to the periodical Studies in Language. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs Editors Werner Abraham Elly van Gelderen University of Vienna / Arizona State University University of Munich Editorial Board Bernard Comrie Christian Lehmann Max Planck Institute, Leipzig University of Erfurt and University of California, Santa Barbara Marianne Mithun William Crot University of California, Santa Barbara University of New Mexico Heiko Narrog Östen Dahl Tohuku University University of Stockholm Johanna L. Wood Gerrit J. Dimmendaal University of Aarhus University of Cologne Debra Ziegeler Ekkehard König University of Paris III Free University of Berlin Volume 167 Causation, Permission, and Transfer. Argument realisation in GET, TAKE, PUT, GIVE and LET verbs Edited by Brian Nolan, Gudrun Rawoens and Elke Diedrichsen Causation, Permission, and Transfer Argument realisation in GET, TAKE, PUT, GIVE and LET verbs Edited by Brian Nolan Institute of Technology, Blachardstown Dublin, Ireland Gudrun Rawoens Ghent University Elke Diedrichsen Microsot European Headquarters, Dublin, Ireland John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM he paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. ./slcs. Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: () / (-) () (-) © – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · he Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Table of contents Introduction 1 Brian Nolan, Elke Diedrichsen and Gudrun Rawoens chapter 1 Encoding transfer, let/allow and permission in Modern Irish: Interaction of causation, event chaining, argument realisation and syntactic variation 13 Brian Nolan chapter 2 Degrees of causativity in German lassen causative constructions 53 Elke Diedrichsen chapter 3 Grammaticalization of ‘give’ in Slavic between drit and contact: Causative, modal, imperative, existential, optative and volative constructions 107 Ruprecht von Waldenfels chapter 4 ‘Give’ and semantic maps 129 Jeremy Collins chapter 5 How Europeans GIVE: A two-layered semantic typology based on two parallel corpora 147 Natalia Levshina chapter 6 Ditransitive constructions in Gan Chinese: A case study of the Yichun dialect 177 XuPing Li vi Causation, Permission, and Transfer chapter 7 he argument realisation of give and take verbs in Māori 195 Aoife Finn chapter 8 GIVE and its arguments in Bohairic Coptic 227 Ewa D. Zakrzewska chapter 9 Giving is receiving: he polysemy of the GET/GIVE verb [tie53] in Shaowu 253 Sing Sing Ngai chapter 10 Enabling and allowing in Hebrew: A Usage-Based Construction Grammar account 271 Elitzur Dattner chapter 11 Low-level patterning of pronominal subjects and verb tenses in English 295 John Newman chapter 12 he morphological, syntactic and semantic interface of the verb GIVE in Lithuanian 327 Jone Bruno chapter 13 Rise and fall of the take-future in written Estonian 353 Ilona Tragel, Külli Habicht and Piret Piiroja chapter 14 Causation in the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara 385 Conor Pyle chapter 15 he fare causative derivation in Italian: A review 425 Alessio S. Frenda chapter 16 Information-structural encoding of recipient in non-canonical alignments of Persian: A constructional account 463 Farhad Moezipour Index 491 Introduction Brian Nolan, Elke Diedrichsen and Gudrun Rawoens his book ofers a comprehensive investigative study of the argument realisa- tion of the concepts of causative purpose, permit, let/allow and transfer in a broad cross-linguistic typologically diverse mix of languages with GIVE, GET, TAKE, PUT, and LET verbs. his volume stands as the irst systematic exploration of these verbs and concepts as they occur in complex events and clauses. he theme of the book is the cross-linguistic argument realisation and syntactic variation of one or more of these verbs with the emphasis on causative purpose, permit, let/allow and transfer. As such, this book brings together scholars and researchers, from a variety of functionally inspired theoretical backgrounds, who have worked on these verbs within one language or from a cross-linguistic perspective. he gener- al objective is, through studying their semantics and syntax within the framework of functional, cognitive and constructional approaches, to arrive at a better un- derstanding of the cross linguistic behaviour of the GET, TAKE, PUT, GIVE and LET verbs and their inter-relationships within a contemporary cognitive-functional linguistic perspective. In this book a wide variety of languages is represented, ranging across Modern Irish, German, Slavic including West Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak and Sorbian) and Western South Slavic (Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian), Germanic, Romance and Slavic language groups, Gan Chinese Yichun dialect, Māori, Bohairic Coptic, Shaowu Chinese, Hebrew, English, Lithuanian, Estonian, the Australian dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, Italian, and Persian. Topics discussed include argument structure and the diferent ways of the en- coding of arguments under causation, permission and transfer verbs, the lexical semantics and event structure of these verbs and the synchronic and diachronic accounts of constructions with causative purpose, permit, let/allow and transfer. his book includes investigations of previously understudied languages, language families and dialects. he purpose of the book is therefore to draw a comprehensive, representa- tive and detailed picture of the vast polysemy, multi-functionality and dynamics doi 10.1075/slcs.167.001int © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company 2 Brian Nolan, Elke Diedrichsen and Gudrun Rawoens of causation, permission and transfer verbs across the languages under study in order to arrive at a better understanding of the cross linguistic behaviour of these verbs. Since Comrie’s (1976) discussion (in Shibatani 1976) on the grammatical sta- tus of the causee nominal, there has been considerable interest in the typological literature of causative constructions. Indeed, Masayoshi Shibatani (2002: 1) notes that: …, no grammatical description can be complete without a discussion of caus- ative constructions, because every human language seems to possess a means of expressing the notion of causation, and this ubiquity, in turn, indicates the fundamental nature of this cognitive category. Such a basic category in human conceptualization is an ideal ield of investigation for cross-linguistic comparison leading to the study of language universals and cross-linguistic variation. Causation has been characterised in a number of ways in linguistic accounts. One such account is from Talmy (2000: 407f.) who characterises the impact of force dynamics over event chains in semantic terms such that force dynamics is shown to play a structuring role across a range of language levels and has direct implica- tions for argument realisation. Force dynamics is seen in this perspective as hav- ing a systematic motivation that structures conceptual material across a linguistic range, in particular across an event frame. Causation is understood as a relation between two events and therefore we need a level of abstract representation be- tween the event structure consisting of two sub-events connected by a causal rela- tion and the type of causative construction. he causal event chain is demarcated by the initial volitional agentive act and by the inal goal that the agent intends as a result of this act. he time interval between the causing event and the caused event is perhaps one of the most important features distinguishing direct and indirect causation. he notions of direct and indirect causation have also been addressed in Dixon (2010: 67) where directness of causation is identiied as one of the relevant semantic parameters of interest. Notwithstanding that a great deal about the nature and grammar of causation is still a mystery, research on causation within the functionalist and typological perspectives Van Valin (2005: 42; n5), and Song (1996: Ch. 1), has converged on the idea that complex events are structured into an inner and an outer event where the outer event is associated with causation and agency and the inner event is associ- ated with telicity and change of state. Many scholars realise that treating causation and, in particular, indirect causation as involving an identical ‘CAUSE’ predicate is a signiicant oversimpliication of the richness of causation and its resonances in event chaining and syntax within the languages of the world. As we will see, direct and indirect causality may be represented by ‘CAUSE’, as in [doʹ (x) CAUSE predʹ Introduction 3 (y)], while permissive causality can, for example, easily be represented by ‘PERMIT’, ‘LET’, or ‘ALLOW’, as appropriate, in any logical meta-representation. Our goal in this book is to investigate, in a range of functionally motivat- ed approaches, the use of functional, cognitive and constructional approaches to understanding the cross-linguistic behaviour of the verbs GET, GIVE, PUT, TAKE and LET and the contribution to these given by the concepts permit, let/allow and transfer and their argument realisation in various syntactic constructions. he selection of GET verbs as a research topic was motivated in several ways and ex- plained by their high frequency, their formal and semantic complexity, their high variability in cross linguistic comparisons and their susceptibility to semantic extension and to grammaticalization. here is already a substantial body of re- search on GIVE verbs (Lenz & Rawoens 2012; Diedrichsen 2012; Nolan 2012a, b, 2013; Gronemeyer 1999), the verbal converses of GET verbs (Newman 1996 and Newman 1997). We address the following main topics and research issues with respect to understanding the cross-linguistic behaviour of the verbs GET, GIVE, PUT, TAKE and LET and the concepts permit, let/allow and transfer: – Mapping at the syntax-semantics interface across these (mostly) 3place verbs – he argument structure of GET, GIVE, PUT, TAKE and LET verbs – he lexical semantics and event structure of GET, GIVE, PUT and TAKE and LET verbs – Argument realisation of GET, GIVE, PUT, TAKE and LET verbs in morphosyntax – he encoding of the signiicant thematic roles in these 3place syntactic constructions – Symmetries and asymmetries in the encoding of arguments in constructions using GET, GIVE, PUT, TAKE and LET verbs – Grammaticalisation with GET, GIVE, PUT, TAKE and LET – GET, GIVE, PUT and TAKE in a constructional perspective – Information structure in constructions with GET, GIVE, PUT, TAKE and LET he aim of the book is to draw a comprehensive, representative and detailed picture of the vast polysemy, multifunctionality and dynamics of GET, GIVE, PUT and TAKE verbs across languages. As these are highly dynamic verbs, we need to understand the behaviours and also syntactic construction patterns in consider- ably more detail. hrough a number of case studies with data examples across a wide variety of languages, the papers in this book explore the speciication of the mapping at the syntax-semantic interface across these concepts and how this can account for the degree of syntactic variation found within their realisation as verbs. In the book, we treat the role of lexical semantics and event structure of the causation, permission and transfer verbs and how these mediate the realisation
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