So let’s talk about adventurers. In some languages, subjects in sentences are happy
to spend their whole lives in the same place they were born and raised. And in other languages,
they get carried away by the spirit of adventure, and just aren’t satisfied unless they’re
on the move. But how can we tell who’s moving up in the world, and who’s stuck back at
home? And do our ambitious travellers leave anything behind in their wake? I’m Moti
Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
At the core of Universal Grammar is the idea that the world’s languages are a lot more similar
than they are different. But these deep connections don’t mean that we can just ignore the tremendous
amount of variety that we see. And one of the most basic ways that languages vary is in their
word order. Like, English puts its subjects at the beginnings of its sentences, but Malagasy
puts them at the end. So, a sentence like “the rain is coming” literally turns into
“come the rain” in Malagasy.
More exactly, the word order of English is subject-verb-object, or SVO. And we can see this
in a sentence like “Russell rang Carl’s doorbell.” Malagasy, on the other hand,
is a VOS language, because it places its subject after the verb phrase instead of before.
Of course, these aren’t the only possibilities! There are six and all of them are attested
in some human language. For example, Japanese is an SOV language; so, “the storm scared
Russell” becomes 嵐がラッセルを怖がらせた — literally, “the storm Russell scared.”
Thankfully, X-Bar Theory was designed to be flexible enough to handle exactly these kinds
of variations! Going back to “Russell rang Carl's doorbell,” our syntactic tree would look like this.
You can see that subject is way up high in the inflectional phrase, or IP, which is the
X-Bar Theory label for sentences. That’s followed by the verb, way down in the verb
phrase. And, finally, we’ve got the object at the very end.
To represent a VOS language, like Malagasy, we just need to rotate our tree around the
IP node, so that the subject comes at the end instead of the beginning.
For an SOV language, like Japanese, we keep the subject where it was, and then rotate
our tree around the VP node instead.
Like decorations hanging off a children’s mobile in a nursery, our subject, verb, and
object can spin around to give us any order we need! Well, almost any order. You might
have noticed that no matter how much we flip stuff around, we can never get the subject
to land between the verb and its object. And this poses a big problem for languages like
Irish, which have a VSO word order. Translated from English, the sentence “the subject
follows the verb in Irish” literally becomes “follows the subject the verb in Irish.” V-S-O!
So what can we do? Well, we’ve already seen words come between verbs and their objects
in other languages, so maybe whatever’s going on there is what’s happening in Irish!
Remember that even though we can’t put an adverb between a verb and its object in English,
as in “Carl hates really the noise,” French is actually at its happiest when we do! In
the sentence “Carl déteste vraiment le bruit,” we’ve argued in the past that
the verb comes before the adverb because it moved up past it.
This fact becomes easier to see when the spot that the verb would normally have moved to is already
filled. In “Carl doit vraiment détester le bruit,” the order of the words is suddenly
English-like, since the modal verb “doit” has already done the heavy lifting, and “détester”
can stay put if it wants to. The reason we never see the kind of alternation in English
that we do in French is because most meaningful English verbs are just too lazy to even try
make the journey.
So, maybe Irish is like French! It moves all its verbs up out of the verb phrase, giving
us the VSO order we’ve been looking for! Except, the spot that French verbs usually
move into comes after the subject — not before. So it looks like we’re back to square
one, with no way of getting that subject sandwiched in between the verb and the object. That is,
unless you’re willing to think a little outside the box.
Up until now, we’ve actually been ignoring a part of the tree: this slot at the top of
the verb phrase. If we suppose that, on top of verb movement, the subject starts off inside
the verb phrase, instead of at the top of the sentence, we’d finally get the word
order we’ve been looking for!
It might look a little weird, but if you think about it, it makes more and more sense. We
know from our episode on wh-islands that syntactic operations seem only to be able to happen
over short distances. We also know that verbs are the engines that drive the syntactic
action, sticking θ-role badges like AGENT and THEME on their subjects and objects to
show what verbal part they play. If it really is true that something like θ-role assignment
can’t happen long-distance, then it makes a lot of sense that we’d find the subject
inside the verb phrase, instead of far away.
So, then, what about English subjects? Are they inside the verb phrase, too? And if not,
how do they get a θ-role? Well, it definitely doesn’t look like subjects are inside the
VP in English, since they come before all the things: modals, auxiliaries, adverbs,
negation. They really are all the way at the front of the sentence — as front as front
can be. But what if they don’t start there? What if English subjects start their adventure
in the verb phrase, just like they do in Irish, and then move up high to get a better view?
The idea that subjects across all languages might begin their life inside the verb phrase
is known as the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis, or VPISH if you’re in a hurry. And even
beyond word order, we have some pretty good reasons to think that this is how language works.
For starters, we’ve seen subjects move out of their home verb phrases before. In passive
sentences like “Dug was distracted by the squirrel,” it looks as if Dug started off
as the object, heard the squirrel, and then ran up the tree to get a better look. In the
normal, active version of this sentence — “the squirrel distracted Dug” — we can see
that Dug starts off, and stays, down inside the VP. So, in passives, it looks like the
subject climbs out of the verb phrase in order to get to the top of the sentence.
But how can we be sure this happens all the time? Even in active sentences? Well, let’s
look at the word “all”! Take the sentence “all the balloons attached to Carl’s house
will take him to Paradise Falls.”
Sometimes, when the subject flies up out of the verb phrase too quickly, it leaves a bit
of itself behind, and we get “the balloons attached to Carl’s house will all bring
him to Paradise Falls.” The word “all” can also show up right next to the main verb!
That poor, lonely “all” down in the VP is what’s known as a floating quantifier.
You might be tempted to think it’s just some special kind of adverb, and was never connected
to Carl’s house to begin with. But, the places in a sentence where it can show up
don’t quite line up with that idea. Adverbs can usually come after the verb, too, like
in “the dogs barked loudly.” But we can’t ever say “the balloons will take all him
there,” or even “the balloons will take him there all.” It can only appear where
we’re supposing the subject used to be.
We see evidence of this kind of movement from idioms, too. If you think back to our episode
about raising verbs, we said that idioms are chunks of syntax whose meanings don’t seem
to come from the meanings of their parts, like “hate to burst your bubble,” where
no actual bubble-bursting is required. To keep their idiomatic meaning afloat, they’ve
got to make their way into the sentence in one fell swoop — not bit by bit. When they
do show up in pieces, but their meaning’s still intact, it’s because a raising verb
like “seem” or “appear” has broken them apart.
So, in “the shoe seems to be on the other foot,” “the shoe” starts off in the
lower clause, and then gets raised up to the front, thanks to the verb “seems.” Since
we can also say things like “the shoe might be on the other foot,” “the shoe will
be on the other foot,” or even “the shoe isn’t really on the other foot at all,”
it looks like “the shoe” starts low in these sentences, too.
Any number of modals, auxiliaries, and adverbs can come between “the shoe” and “the
other foot,” while still hanging onto the idiom’s essence. This shouldn’t happen
if the subject started off up high where it could get idiomatically cut off.
Finally, we find reasons to believe that subjects are born in the verb phrase from semantics,
too. In a sentence like “one bird always manages to get away,” we can imagine that
there’s one specific bird — say, “Kevin” — who always gets away. The word “one”
kind of acts like an existential quantifier picking out one specific bird, and this first
meaning is consistent with everything being interpreted where it appears.
But it can also mean that some bird or other always gets away, and it isn’t always Kevin.
That interpretation is more consistent with the subject “one bird” showing up after
the adverb “always”. “Always” kind of acts like a universal quantifier that picks
out a bunch of different times or birds, and generalizes across them. If the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis
is true, then we can imagine making sense of the sentence either before or after the
subject has moved, which accounts for each alternative.
So for our journey through syntax, the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis makes for a more reliable
map to what’s happening where in our sentences. With VPISH showing us the way, we’re ready
for some bigger linguistic adventures.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week. If you made your way up and
out of the verb phrase, you learned that X' Theory needs a bit of modifying to get it
to capture certain word orders, especially for VSO languages like Irish; that the VP-Internal
Subject Hypothesis can explain the kind of variation we see, and fits better with our
existing theory; and that evidence shows that even in languages like English, the subject
begins life in the verb phrase.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman, and directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost. This
week’s episode was written by Stephan Hurtubise. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our music
is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments
below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we’ll have some
extra material on this topic.
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next Wednesday. Dähna hunu!