So let’s talk about choice. Sometimes, when we say a sentence, deciding between one word
or another is just a matter of taste, without any real effect. Other times, the differences
are game-changing. But some choices are sneaky, with options that look similar enough, but
lead you to strange and unexpected endings. How can we avoid confusion and make sure we’ve
chosen the right path? I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
So, imagine you said “Stanley seems to be alone.” But, then you think a bit more,
and realize, “No! On second thought, Stanley WANTS to be alone!” Swapping out one word
for another seems pretty easy, right? We just pluck out “seems” and plug in “wants”;
game over! It’s like applying a new coat of paint: the sentence looks a little different,
but the underlying structure’s intact.
But when we consider what we’ve learned about syntax so far, something doesn’t sit
quite right. If you look back to our video about theta roles, you’ll remember that
each verb is a bit like a screenplay that’s been written with certain sets of roles in
mind. In order for the movie to make sense, these roles need to be filled with the right
number and right kinds of noun phrases, so that the verb fits comfortably into its sentence.
To make sure that the verb always gets what it needs, we introduced the Theta Criterion,
which is like the casting director; it makes sure that each part is cast with exactly one
actor — no more and no less.
But just what roles are being assigned in those sentences? In both cases, Stanley’s
definitely the one who’s alone, and in our second sentence, Stanley’s definitely doing
the wanting. But in the first sentence, is Stanley really actively doing any seeming? I mean, what
would it even mean for someone to seem? It doesn't look like these verbs are assigning the same roles.
But that means we have to figure out exactly what role a verb like seem assigns to Stanley,
and the answer to that problem doesn’t seem so obvious.
To make matters even worse, it turns out the two verbs aren’t as interchangeable as they
first appear to be. So, we can say something like “It seems Stanley is alone”, but
we definitely can’t say “It wants Stanley is alone.” So, what’s going on here? To
solve this mystery, we’ll start by zooming in on what exactly that “it” is doing
before “seem”. Not only is it not doing any seeming, it doesn’t even seem to refer to anything!
It’s just this weird, empty, dummy pronoun, sitting at the front of the sentence, like
a soulless worker stuck in some meaningless job!
But we’ve see these sorts of pronouns in other places, too. We find them at the beginnings
of sentences about the weather, like “It’s cold”, or in so-called there-sentences,
like “there’s nobody in the office”.
If you think back to when we talked about the Principles & Parameters of Universal Grammar,
you might remember that these dummy pronouns tend to show up in some languages, and not
others. Syntacticians have dubbed this switch the Null Subject Parameter.
Null subject languages like Italian or Polish happily leave these empty words out, while
non-null subject languages like English or French have no choice but to include them.
So while you have to say “It rains” in English, you can drop the subject completely
and say “Piove” in Italian. The “it” is meaningless, it doesn’t even get a theta
role - its only purpose is to be a subject.
Okay, so that’s what that “it” is doing there before “seem”. It’s like a seat-filler.
So how come sometimes we find “Stanley” there instead? Well, think about it this way:
verbs like “seem” don’t assign theta roles to their subjects any more than verbs
like “rain” do. “Seem” doesn’t need an agent, and it couldn’t really even have
one if it wanted to; it just wouldn’t make any sense, like… what would something
even be seeming? But because English needs a noun phrase there anyway, it can employ
the pronoun “it” . . . or, it can decide to steal a noun phrase from below. It can steal Stanley.
So, in a sentence like “Stanley seems to be alone,” even though Stanley really belongs
much closer to “alone” than to “seem”, the higher verb gets jealous and snatches
Stanley up, putting him all the way at the front of the sentence!
Since it’s next to ‘alone’ in the underlying form, it gets its theta role there, and then
moves up to the top. For this reason, verbs like “seem” are known as raising verbs,
because their subjects start off low and then get raised up.
By stacking one raising verb on top of another, we can even watch as Stanley climbs
the tree! “It seems it is likely Stanley is alone” can become “It seems Stanley
is likely to be alone,” which can turn into “Stanley seems likely to be alone”. Neat!
But we’ve only told you half the parable so far. What about the verb “want”?
Or even “choose” or “try”? It doesn’t look like they’re raising verbs, because
they don’t need to steal their subjects from anybody. In “Stanley chose to walk
through the door on the right,” Stanley’s definitely doing the choosing. Problem is,
he’s doing the walking too! And this looks like a violation of the Theta Criterion, because
we’re not allowed to get one noun phrase playing two parts!
But maybe that’s okay, though. Maybe “Stanley” starts off with one theta role, and then climbs
up the tree to get another one; maybe Stanley’s just strapped for cash and needs to take on
two jobs. Maybe it’s just the exception that proves the rule! Except, we can show
that that can’t be true, because of the behaviour of idioms.
Idioms are chunks of words whose overall meanings don’t seem to follow from the meanings of
their individual parts. So, like, “The Narrator let the cat out of the bag” doesn’t really
mean there were any captive kitties; it means that he divulged some secret. And if “Mariella
was beside herself”, it doesn’t mean that she has a twin or a clone or anything; it just
means that she was taken aback.
But in order for idioms to keep their idiomatic meaning, they need to stay chunky. That means
they need to enter a sentence fully formed and ready to go; they can’t wait to be built
up piece by piece. But, what does this have to do with our verbal confusion? Well, say
I’m talking about Kris, and I tell you that “The apple seems to have fallen far from
the tree.” You’d know I mean that he grew up to be different from his parents. But if
I tell you that “The apple decided to fall far from the tree,” it sounds like I’m
talking about a surprisingly smart and inexplicably ambulatory piece of fruit.
That’s because, in the raising sentence, the idiom started off all packaged together
way down below at the bottom with its idiomatic meaning intact, and then “seem” picked
“the apple” out of tree and put it front and centre, because all English sentences
need subjects. In the other sentence, the apple started off at the beginning, as the
subject of “decide”; it was never anywhere near "the tree" to begin with, and so the idiom
never even got off the ground.
So if Stanley’s the one in control of his decisions in a sentence like “Stanley decided
to press the button for four hours,” and Stanley’s also the one doing all the button-pressing,
how do we make sure Stanley gets a theta role from both verbs, without moving him around
or breaking our existing rules? To get through the problem, we’ll have to introduce something
new to our syntactic theory: silent pronouns.
We’ve already seen some silent constituents in our trees before, like the traces left
behind after moving a word from one part of a sentence to another. Silent pronouns, which
we’ll call “PRO”, are a bit like traces: you can’t hear them, but they have tangible
effects on the sentences they show up in.
So, basically, for a sentence like “Stanley was reluctant to follow the Adventure Line”,
its tree would end up looking like this.
That PRO in the lower clause is like a silent reflexive pronoun; it refers back to Stanley
in much the same way that a word like “himself” does. And because certain verbs impose this
kind of structure onto the sentence, where the subject controls the meaning of this silent
pronoun, we call them control verbs.
Now, it’s pretty convenient for us to suppose that there’s this thing we can’t even see that
lets us keep the idea that each noun phrase gets exactly one theta role, by giving “Stanley”
one and PRO the other. But do we have any actual independent evidence that this silent
pronoun exists? Well, for one, we do see full noun phrases in the same spot, like in “The
Narrator didn’t expect Stanley to spend so much time in the broom closet”. If we
drop “Stanley” and replace him with PRO, we then get “The Narrator didn’t expect
to spend so much time in the broom closet,” where we understand that the Narrator didn’t
expect it of himself. PRO is filling in for the Narrator!
And, we have some pretty strong evidence from Binding Theory. We know that the first principle
of Binding Theory — Principle A — says that reflexive pronouns have to refer back
to something inside their own clause. Since we can easily say something like “Stanley
refused to help himself”, it looks like there must be something inside the lower,
embedded clause that we can’t see, which binds “himself” because “Stanley”
is too far away in the higher clause to do it. If PRO weren’t in there, the sentence
would collapse under the weight of Principle A, and the whole story would end in disaster!
Raising and control verbs look very similar on the surface, but deep down they generate
very different structures, with pretty big changes in meaning too. Picking one word or
another might seem trivial, but as it turns out: small choices can have a big impact.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week. If you controlled your interpretations
right, you learned that swapping out one verb for another can drastically alter the underlying
structure of a sentence; that raising verbs need subjects just like other verbs do, and
will sometimes resort to stealing them from other parts of the sentence; and that control
verbs look an awful lot like raising verbs, but don’t involve movement, and instead
use a silent pronoun called PRO.
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
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subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Ka e mesia!