A causal decomposition for associated motion events in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec

John Duff

Abstract:

It is a common observation that language is limited in the kinds of events it may encode in a single clause. Vendler (1957) posits that the most complex event descriptions, accomplishments, describe a process and its result. Seemingly in line with such a limit, English resultatives can only specify result states with post-verbal lexical material if a result isn’t already present (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995), and productive morphological causatives in e.g. Hindi-Urdu (Bhatt & Embick [2003] 2017, Ramchand 2008) and Japanese (Harley 2008, Pylkkänen 2008) often feature similar restrictions on application.
Sometimes it has been claimed based on these kinds of observations that there are cross-linguistic, conceptual limits on the complexity and content of event descriptions (e.g. Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995), within a theory of templatic verbal meaning with atoms like DO and CAUSE (Dowty 1979). Other approaches, e.g. Borer (2005), propose constraints derived from limited generativity in the syntax, where individual syntactic heads correspond to those Dowtian atoms. Not everyone admits the existence of hard constraints, however: Ramchand (2008) proposes canonical events involve a tripartite verbal syntax, but leaves open the possibility of recursion within that syntax for more complex meanings.
Accounts of these restrictions make strong predictions which have not been rigorously examined outside of the domain of causatives and resultatives. In this paper, I introduce a type of morphologically-complex predicate which has not yet been discussed in this literature, and which is free from the proposed restrictions discussed above. Though monoclausal, it describes a complex event with more atomic sub- events than merely a process and a result, and its sub-events are related in a manner which is not among the canonical Dowtian relations. In the face of this data, our theories of the restrictions on event composition will need to expand, or else we must understand why these exceptions should be permitted.