60 The Demise of Definitions, Part I

out.
The Linguist’s Tale 59
Consider the following, chosen practically at random. It’s a sketch of
Pinker’s account of how the fact that a verb has the syntactic property of
being ‘dativizable’ (of figuring in alternations like ‘give Mary a book’/‘give
a book to Mary’) can be inferred from the child’s data about the semantics
of the verb.
Dativizable verbs have a semantic property in common: they must be capable of
denoting prospective possession of the referent of the second object by the referent
of the first object . . . [But] possession need not be literal . . . [V]erbs of
communication are treated as denoting the transfer of messages or stimuli, which
the recipient metaphorically possesses. This can be seen in sentences such as ‘He
told her the story,’ ‘He asked her a question,’ and ‘She showed him the answer’ [all
of which have moved datives]. (Pinker 1989: 48)
What exactly Pinker is claiming here depends quite a lot on what relation
“prospective possession” is, and on what is allowed as a metaphor for that
relation; and, of course, we aren’t told either. If John sang Mary a song,
does Mary metaphorically prospectively possess the song that John sang
to her? If so, does she also metaphorically prospectively possess a
goodnight in “John wished Mary a goodnight?” Or consider:
Zen told his story to the judge/Zen told the judge his story
but
Zen repeated his story to the judge/*Zen repeated the judge his story.
I think this is a counter-example to Pinker’s theory about datives. Could
the difference really be that the judge was a prospective possessor of the
story when Zen told it the first time, but not when he repeated it? On the
other hand, since who knows what prospective possession is, or what
might express it metaphorically, who knows whether such cases refute the
analysis?
Or consider:
John showed his etchings to Mary/John showed Mary his etchings.
but
John exhibited his etchings to Mary/*John exhibited Mary his
etchings.
Is it that Mary is in metaphorical possession of etchings that are shown to
her but not of etchings that are exhibited to her? How is one to tell? More
to the point, how is the child to tell ? Remember that, according to Pinker’s
story, the child figures out that ‘exhibit’ doesn’t dative-move when he
60 The Demise of Definitions, Part I
decides that it doesn’t—even metaphorically—express prospective
possession. But how on earth does he decide that?13
I should emphasize that Pinker is explicitly aware that there are
egregious exceptions to his semantic characterization of the constraints on
dative movement, nor does he suppose that appeals to “metaphorical
possession” and the like can always be relied on to get him off the hook.
At least one of the things that he thinks is going on with the double-object
construction is a morphological constraint on dative movement:
polysyllabic verbs tend to resist it (notice show/*exhibit; tell/*repeat in the
examples above). But though Pinker remarks upon the existence of such
non-semantic constraints, he appears not to see how much trouble they
make for his view.
Remember the architecture of Pinker’s argument.What’s on offer is an
inference from ontogenetic considerations to the conclusion that there are
definitions.What shows that there are definitions is that there is a semantic
level of linguistic representation at which verbs are lexically decomposed.
What shows that there are semantic-level representations is that you need
semantic vocabulary to formulate the hypotheses that the child projects in
the course of learning the lexicon; and that’s because, according to Pinker,
these hypotheses express correlations between certain semantic properties
of lexical items, on the one hand, and the grammatical structures that the
items occur in, on the other. Double-object constructions, as we’ve seen,
are supposed to be paradigms.
But it now appears that the vocabulary required to specify the
conditions on such constructions isn’t purely semantic after all; not even
according to Pinker. To predict whether a verb permits dative movement,
The Linguist’s Tale 61
13 When Pinker’s analyses are clear enough to evaluate, they are often just wrong. For
example, he notes in his discussion of causatives that the analysis PAINTVTR = cover with
paint is embarrassed by such observations as this: although when Michelangelo dipped his
paintbrush in his paint pot he thereby covered the paintbrush with paint, nevertheless he did
not, thereby, paint the paintbrush. (The example is, in fact, borrowed from Fodor 1970.)
Pinker explains that “stereotypy or conventionality of manner constrains the causative . . .
This might be called the ‘stereotypy effect’” (1984: 324). So it might, for all the good it does.
It is possible, faut de mieux, to paint the wall with one’s handkerchief; with one’s bare hands;
by covering oneself with paint and rolling up the wall (in which last case, by the way, though
covering the wall with the paint counts as painting the wall, covering oneself with the paint
does not count as painting oneself even if one does it with a paintbrush; only as getting
oneself covered with paint).
Whether you paint the wall when you cover it with paint depends not on how you do it
but on what you have in mind when you do it: you have to have in mind not merely to cover
the wall with paint but to paint the wall. That is, “paintvtr” apparently can’t be defined even
in terms of such closely related expressions as “paintn”. Or, if it can, none of the
decompositional analyses suggested so far, Pinker’s included, comes even close to showing
how.
you need to know not only whether it expresses (literally or metaphorically)
‘prospective possession’, but also the pertinent facts about its morphology.
What account of the representation of lexical structure does this
observation imply? The point to notice is that there isn’t, on anybody’s
story, any one level of representation that specifies both the semantic and
the morphological features of a lexical item. In particular, it’s a defining
property of the (putative) semantic level that it abstracts from the sorts of
(morphological, phonological, syntactic, etc.) properties that distinguish
between synonyms. For example, the semantic level is supposed not to
distinguish the representation of (e.g.) “bachelor” from the representation
of “unmarried man”, the representation of “kill” from the representation
of “cause to die”, and so forth.
Well, if that’s what the semantic level is, and if the facts about
morphological constraints on double-object structures are as we (and
Pinker) are supposing them to be, then the moral is that there is no level
of linguistic representation at which the constraints on dative movement
can be expressed: not the morphological level because (assuming that
Pinker’s story about “prospective possession” is true) morphological
representation abstracts from the semantic properties on which dative
movement is contingent. And, precisely analogously, not the semantic level
because semantic level representation abstracts from the morphological
properties of lexical items on which dative movement is also contingent.
Time to pull this all together and see where the argument has gotten.
Since heaven only knows what “prospective possession” is, there’s no
seriously evaluating the claim that dative movement turns on whether a
verb expresses it. What does seem clear, however, is that even if there are
semantic constraints on the syntactic behaviour of double-object verbs,
there are also morphological constraints on their syntactic behaviour. So
to state such generalizations at a single linguistic level, you would need to
postulate not semantic representations but morphosemantic representations.
It is, however, common ground that there is no level of
representation in whose vocabulary morphological and semantic
constraints can be simultaneously imposed.
This isn’t a paradox; it is perfectly possible to formulate conditions that
depend, simultaneously, on semantic and morphological properties of
lexical items without assuming that there is a semantic level (and, for that
matter, without assuming that there is a morphological level either). The
way to do so is to suppose that lexical entries specify semantic features of
lexical items.
Linguistic discussions of lexical semantics just about invariably confuse
two questions we are now in a position to distinguish: Are there semantic
features? and Is there a semantic level? It is, however, important to keep