Essays Mustafa LISSIM 6

As a new applicant for the LISSIM, I expect the participation would provide me with new insights into understanding of the syntactic and semantic nature of motion verb roots in Arabic. An exposure to the recent developments in syntax-semantics interface would help me in developing a possible account for the nature of conflation between a motion verb and its Path complement. The account can be extended to capture other categorial conflations e.g. denominal, deadjectival and locative and locatum verbs.

Talmy's works (1985, 1991, and 2000) on crosslinguistic typology of lexicalization patterns for the domain of motion have arisen a great deal of research and debate in the literature over the last three decades. Motion events consist of a set of six basic semantic components: Figure, Ground, Path, motion, Manner, and Cause. On the basis of how the motion of a specific semantic domain is mapped onto syntactic and lexical structures, Talmy distinguishes two-way language typology: satellite-framed and verb-framed languages.

A satellite-framed language, like English, expresses the core component of motion, i.e. the Path or trajectory of motion, in satellites (e.g. up, down, out) or in prepositional phrases (e.g. into/out of the house) whereas a verb-framed language, take Arabic here as an example, cannot express the core component of motion in separate elements. Rather, Path or trajectory of motion in Arabic is usually conflated with the main verb, e.g. nazal 'get down', daxal 'go in', xaraj 'go out'. Compare the following examples; (1) from English and (2) from Arabic.

One difference lies in how the two sentences encode the Path of motion. In English, it is a particle or – in Talmy’s terms – a satellite to the verb, that encodes the core information about the Path of movement, whereas, in Arabic, the verb, daxal 'enter’, expresses this information.

The second difference relates to the expression of the Manner of movement. Since English does not encode Path in the main verb, this slot is available for Manner verbs such as ran.

In Arabic, on the other hand, this slot is already occupied by Path verbs, and Manner of motion tends to be conveyed in a separate expression such as the gerund jaryan ‘running’. Such complementarity between the Manner and the Path in verb lexicalization might not be valid in the case of Arabic; rather, it raises a theoretical problem for Talmy's typology. Consider the following examples from Arabic.

The verbs tasalqa 'climbed up' and haraba 'ran away' are of inherently directed motion, i.e. up and away respectively. The verbs also encode the Manner of motion, i.e, climbing and fleeing respectively. It does not seem that the Manner and the Path are competing for one slot. This might suggest that the distribution between the Manner and Path does not have a crucial role in parameterizing languages. The research will discuss two main problems.

The research question is whether the broad categories of Path and Manner are crucial enough to keep in mind while parameterizing languages or we need to look for more subtle differences in the motion lexicon; a number of fine-grained categories or parameters (e.g. barretxe-Antuñano, (2006a); Özçalişkan, (2004); Slobin; (2005)), Levin and Rapport Hovav's (1988) principle of lexical subordination, Jackendoff's (1991) Go-adjunct rule, Synder's (1995) null telic morpheme linked to compound Parameter, Inagaki's (2001) parameterized Path conflation, and Zubizerreta and Oh's (2007) verbal compound parameter.

In line with these proposals, it seems to me that any attempt to parameterize languages on the basis of the conflation of motion verbs with the Path or the Manner in its broad term is not sufficient. Rather; a parametric variation should be restricted to the subtypes of Path category. Arabic provides enough support for this departure.

- No conflation of any Path type, i.e. source or goal Path, is allowed with deictic verbs.

The distribution of the subtypes of the Path might suggest that we should look at lexical features narrower than the category of Path, while parameterizing languages. And the parameterized variation should not be confined to inflectional systems. Hale & Keyser (1998) among others have drawn similar conclusion.

The research work attempts to find a possible account for the nature of interaction between the lexicon and syntax. Authors, i.e. Slobin and Berman (1994) among others, have argued that the meaning components of direction, Manner and direct external cause have proven to be useful for the lexical semantic representation of motion verbs, as they seem to account for the different syntactic realizations of motion verbs. In the same connection, many theories, e.g. Ramchand's (2008), have built on the assumption that the syntactic realization of arguments is largely predictable from the meanings of verbs.

My research seeks to develop an account for interaction between syntax and semantics in the motion domain, relying upon two minimalist premises: (i) the merge to avoid crashing at PF and (ii) the lexical parametric variation across languages. I expect the account can also be extended to explain the nature of categorial conflations of Arabic; the derivation of verbs from noun roots (Denominal conflation), from Adjectives (Deadjectival conflation) or from prepositions (Locative and Locatum conflation). Space considerations force me to mention the categorial conflations in brief.

To end, the discussions with the LISSIM-6 faculty (Bhattacharya, Bobalijk, Kidwai, Lahiri, Pancheva, Pesetsky and others) would open up a way of addressing the research issues.

Hale, K. & J. Keyser. (1998). The Basic Elements of Argument Structure. In Papers from The UPenn/MIT Roundtable on Argument Structure and Aspect: MITWPL 32, ed. Heidi Harley. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Cambridge, 73-118.

Hale, K., and J. Keyser. (2000a).Conflation. In Ana Bravo Martin, Carlos Lujan Berenguel, Isabel Perez Jimenez (eds.) Cuadernos de Lingüistica VII 2000, Documentos de Trabajo. Lingüistica Teَrica. Madrid: Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset. Pp. 39-76.

Hale, K., and J. Keyser. (2002). Prolegomenon to a theory of argument tstructure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Inagaki, S. (2001). Motion verbs with locational/directional PPs in English and Japanese. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics, 15, 37–79, McGill University, Montreal.

Jackendoff, R., & Landau, B. (1991). Spatial language and spatial cognition. In D.J.

Napoli & J. Keg (Eds.), Bridges between psychology and linguistics: A Swarthmore Festschrift for Lila Gleitman (pp. 145-169). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Levin, B., & Rapoport, T. (1986). Lexical subordination. In Papers from the Twenty-fourth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (pp. 275-289). Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Linguistics.

Levin, B., and Rappaport Hovav, M.(1992). The lexical semantics of verbs of motion: the perspective from unaccusativity. In IgnacioM. Roca (ed.), Thematic structure: Its role in grammar, 247–269. Berlin: Foris.

Ramchand, G. (2006). Verb meaning and the lexicon: A first phase syntax. MS, University of Tromsø.

Ramchand, G. (2007). Selection, conflation and denominal verbs. Talk given at the Workshop on Argument Structure. Vittoria-Gasteiz, the Basque Country, May 2007.

Rappaport Hovav, M.& B. Levin, (1998) Building verb meanings. In: M. Butt & W. Geuder (eds), 97-134.

Slobin, D. (1996). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning, ed. Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson, 195–220. Oxford: Clarendon

Slobin, D. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven, (Eds.), Relating events in narratives (vol. 2): typological and contextual perspectives. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Snyder, W. (1995). Language Acquisition and Language Variation: The Role of Morphology. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.

Talmy, L. (1975). Semantics and syntax of motion. In John P. Kimball (ed.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 4, 181–238. New York: Academic Press.

Talmy, L. (1978). Figure and Ground in Complex Sentences. In Universals of Human Language, Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), 625-649. Standford: Stanford University Press

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical form. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Linguistic Typology and Syntactic Description: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, L. (2000a). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Volume I: Concept Structuring System. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Mass.

Talmy, L. (2000b). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Volume II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Mass.

Zubizarreta, L. & E. Oh ( 2007). On the Syntactic Composition of Manner and motion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[i] Conflation in Talmy's (1985) terms refers to the ‘cases where more than one semantic element is realised (lexicalized) in a single morpheme. Similarly, conflation in Hale & Keyser's (2002) terms refers to the process of ‘fusion of syntactic nuclei’ that accounts for derivations in which the phonological matrix of the head of a complement (say, N) is inserted into the head, empty or affixal, that governs it, giving rise to a single word (a denominal verb (e.g., dance, laugh, box, bottle, saddle) where the conflating head is N; a deadjectival verb (e.g., clear, narrow, thin) where the conflating head is A; and so on).

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