The Lexicon-Discourse Interface: light have
The central difficulty for interpreting an analysis of light have verb in conjunction with a verbal
complement is reflected by the variable assignment of different thematic roles to its subject as either
causer, experiencer or ambiguously one of them as in (1a), (1b) and (1c), respectively.
(1)
a.
b.
c.
The CIA director(causer) had the agent killed.
The CIA director (experiencer) had an agent die on him.
John had (causer/experiencer) his students walk out of class.
Previous analyses of English light have, have taken two main directions. .Some analyses (e.g., Ritter and
Rosen 1997, Harley 1998) of this verb are based on arguments related to syntactic observations and
designate it as a functor predicate whose only role is the amendment of the argument structure of the
embedded predicate. A second line of research (Brunson 1992) has proposed that the light verb have has
its own underspecified meaning, which then influences the interpretation of the complex predicate and
allows either the causer reading as in (1a,c) or the experiencer reading as in (1b,c).
One common point and one of the main drawbacks of all these approaches is that they try to unify all the
uses of the verb have, auxiliary and main, with both nominal and verbal complements. The representations,
which express different kinds of parallelisms between all these uses, lead to very weak and fragile
predictions about the behavior of have. A second problem is that the clues for disambiguation of causer vs.
experiencer readings are all sought within the clause, and are all assumed to be syntactically motivated.
However, a corpus studyi shows very clearly that most of the syntactic factors that have been identified as
crucial for the interpretation of the subject of light have do not stand up in the context of real usage. This
talk establishes that discourse factors instead play an important role in the interpretation of the subject of
light have, but that these discourse factors must be evaluated in conjunction with the underspecified lexical
information provided by light have and some lexical and syntactic information from within the clause. The
interaction of all these pieces of information is complex and allows for a fruitful investigation of the
discourse-syntax-lexicon interface.
In our analysis, we assume the SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation) architecture proposed by
Asher and Lascarides (2003). SDRT provides a very detailed way of inferring the appropriate rhetorical
relations among sentences and its architecture proposes a common inference system for all the relevant
information for the resolution of underspecificied information. Syntactic knowledge can be used as input to
default inference rules in the framework of glue logic of SDRT, the logic that integrates knowledge from
diverse sources and contributes essentially in building the right discourse connections. Consider the
following example from our corpus.
(2)
Charity believes herself to be the child <quote_>"of a drunken
convict and a mother who wasn't 'half human,' and was glad to have
her go"<quote/>.
As already mentioned above, we assume an underspecified meaning for light have. This is represented in
terms of a complex SDRS like in (3).
(3)
1
e1
main-predicate(e1)
2
e?,x,
?(e?,x)
CauseD(?,?)
e?<e?
In analyzing light have as in (3), we essentially follow Asher and Lascarides (1995, 2003), who represent
causative and psych verbs as complex DRSs with a causal connection between parts of the DRS so that one
of the sub-DRSs entails the existence of an eventuality inferred by the context. We similarly assume a
causal component of have (this is also in line with the previous syntactitically oriented approaches). This
causal component relates two eventualities (but not an individual and the eventuality denoted by the
complement of have, as is assumed by most synatical, argument structure oriented approaches). The causal
link CauseD relates utterances, which express events, and its role in SDRT is to feed the conditional part of
the default axioms for inferring rhetorical relations like Explanation or Result.
In (2), for example, the eventuality denoted by the main predicate “go” is e1 in the representation of (4).
The other eventuality is underspecified according to (3), and can either remain underspecified, or be
resolved via inferences based on information coming from lexical. syntactic and discoursal information. In
(2), the underspecification is resolved in favor of the experiencer reading on the basis of the constraint/clue
that the subject of have is the experiencer of the discourse accessible stative predicate “being glad” in the
previous clause. Thus, the resolved underspecified lexical information would look like (4).
(4)
1
e1 x
go(e1,x)
2
e2,y,
glad(e2,y)
Charity(y)
CauseD(1,2)
e1<e2
References
Asher, Nicholas, and Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press.
Belvin, Robert. 1993. The two causative haves are the two possessive haves. MIT Working Papers in
Linguistics 20:19–34.
Harley, Heidi. 1998. You’re having me on: Aspects of have. In La grammaire de la possession, ed. J.
Gu´eron and A. Zribi-Hertz, 195–226. Paris. Universit´e Paris X - Nanterre.
McIntyre, Andrew. 2005. The Interpretation of German datives and English have. In Datives and Similar
Cases, ed. Werner Abraham, Daniel Hole, and Andre Meinunger. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. To appear.
Ritter, Elizabeth, and Sara T. Rosen. 1991. Causative have. In Proceedings of NELS 21, 323–337.
Ritter, Elizabeth, and Sara T. Rosen. 1993. Deriving Causation. Natutral Language and Linguistic Theory
11:519–555.
Ritter, Elizabeth, and Sara T. Rosen. 1997. The function of have. Lingua 101:295–321.
Cowper, Elizabeth A. 1989. Thematic Underspecification: the case of have. Toronto Working Papers in
Linguistics 10:85–93.
i
The study is based on FROWN and FLOB corpora (1 000 000 words of written English from the early
1990s in American and British English, respectively). These corpuses yielded 234 examples of light have.