How Do Verbs Cause Things? Splitting the Verb Phrase

How do verbs like "give" and "put" juggle more than one object? Is there an element that lets verbs cause things to happen? In this week's episode, we talk about splitting up the verb phrase: how our basic syntactic theory has a hard time with verbs with more than one object; how the syntax of causation shows us why we should expand our trees; and how once we break the phrase up, we can capture all sorts of facts, from two-object verbs to ambiguities.

This is Topic #88!

This week's tag language: Kajin M̧ajeļ!

Related videos:
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Referential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory -    • Binding Theory and Interpreting Pronouns  
Up, Up, and Away: The Verb Phrase Initial Subject Hypothesis -    • Where Do Subjects Start Out in Senten...  

Last episode:
Worlds Between Us: The Pragmatics of Presuppositions -    • Thinking vs. Knowing: The Semantics a...  

Other of our syntax videos:
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A Clause for Celebration: A History of Syntactic Clauses -    • What Makes a Basic Sentence? A Histor...  

Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on how these ideas connect to the passive voice, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-88/

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Sources:
Much of the basic argument found in the video can be found in this set of slides: https://apps.carleton.edu/people/cuss...

Examples were taken from Lisa Travis's 2010 book Inner Aspect (http://blogs.mcgill.ca/mcling/files/2...) and this paper by Heidi Harley:
http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/mrg.readi...

There's also good stuff in the Wikipedia article on causatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causati...

Some of the original work proposing splitting the VP includes Angelika Kratzer's 1996 paper "Severing the external
argument from its verb" in Rooryck & Zaring, eds., "Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109-137". (https://people.ucsc.edu/~mcclosk/Teac...) and Richard Larson's 1988 paper "On the double object construction" in Linguistic Inquiry 19(3), 335-391.

Looking forward to next time!