MORE ON OBJECTLESS TRANSITIVES AND ERGATIVIZATION PATTERNS IN ENGLISH
Submission for a special volume of the journal Constructions, with selected papers of the Construction Grammar
conference in Marseille (2004).
© Maarten Lemmens
Université Lille 3 & CNRS, France
In two relatively recent papers, Goldberg (2001, to appear) provides a valuable analysis of
transitive constructions without an overt object, as in She contributed to the Leukemia
Foundation. Goldberg correctly stresses that this construction, which she terms the Deprofiled
Object Construction or DOC for short, has a clear semantic value, pointing out that
“[o]mission of the patient argument is possible when the patient argument is construed to be
deemphasized in the discourse vis à vis the action” (2001). Clearly, the construction remains
transitive as the Patient is still understood even when not overtly expressed. Goldberg further
discusses some of the factors that may bring about deemphasizing of the object (repeated or
habitual actions, politeness strategies, etc.) as well as some (lexical) factors that prevent
object omission. It is especially the latter issue for which the present paper offers a more
nuanced, and at the same time more general, alternative.
More specifically, while insisting on the semantic impact of the construction, Goldberg
relies on the lexical specifications of the individual verb to explain why certain verbs do not
sanction the objectless construction. For example, the verb break does not tolerate the DOC
all to well: I broke is not an alternate construction to I broke the dishes. Goldberg argues that
the Patients of break cannot be omitted without any problem because “[b]ubbles, TVs,
breadsticks, and hearts break in very different ways and with very different consequences”
(Goldberg 2001). They cannot be omitted indeed, but the argument she offers is incorrect.
When one looks at verbs such as cut, kill, or make that do allow the omitted object
construction, one notices that the range of Patients that can occur with these verbs is equally
varied and they will be cut, killed or made in quite different ways as well.
In our approach, we aim to retain the constructional value (we will, consequently, not
entirely follow Rice’s (1988) lexical approach) yet at the same time we do not want to claim
that lexical issues have no importance. On the contrary, we argue that there is indeed a
complex interaction between verbal and constructional meaning, but arguably along different
paths than Goldberg suggests. More specifically, we follow Davidse (1999) and Lemmens
(1998) who argue for a paradigmatic point of view on the objectless construction. They
defend the idea that the grammar of English causative events is governed by two different
causative models, the transitive and the ergative, which each impose their own construal on
an event. These construals entail different ways in which the participants are engaged in the
process, as reflected in the different constructional alternations the paradigms allow. The
objectless construction, Davidse and Lemmens point out, is a strictly transitive phenomenon,
singling out the conceptual nucleus of the transitive event, the ACTOR-PROCESS
constellation. The ergative model, on the other hand, centers around the second participant,
the Patient, as illustrated by the hallmark of this paradigm, the non-causative alternation (e.g.,
Floyd broke the glass vs. The glass broke). The object cannot be omitted in the latter case, as
it is the conceptual nucleus of the process.
Our cognitive lexico-paradigmatic approach will be evaluated against ample corpus
examples for three prototypically ergative verbs: starve, suffocate and break, drawn from the
BNC as well as from Internet data (concordances obtained via WebCorp). We show how for
the different verbs specific lexical matters do indeed interfere with constructional
possibilities, be it in different ways than Goldberg has it. In short, our approach, applied to an
elaborate corpus analysis, will provide important nuances to Goldberg’s constructional
analysis as well as to Davidse’s paradigmatic account. The data will help us to unravel the
intricate and contextually variable interaction between constructional and lexical semantics.
References
Goldberg. Adele E. 2001. “Patient Arguments of causative verbs can be omitted: the role of
information structure in argument distribution,” Language Sciences 34/4-5. 503-524.
———. to appear. “Constructions, Lexical Semantics and the Correspondence Principle:
Accounting for Generalizations and Subregularities in the Realization of Arguments”. In:
Nomi Erteschik-Shir and Tova Rapoport (éds.). The Syntax of Aspect, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Davidse, Kristin. 1999. Categories of Experiential Grammar. Monographs in Systemic
Linguistics X. Nottingham: University of Nottingham. (reprint of Davidse 1991, PhD
Thesis, K.U.Leuven).
Lemmens, M. 1998. Lexical Perspectives on Transitivity and Ergativity. Causative
Constructions in English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rice, Sally. 1988. “Unlikely Lexical Entries”. Berkeley Linguistics Society 14.202-212.