A N O T E ON T H E R E L A T I O N B E T W E E N A G E N T A N D S T A T I V I T Y

I. In Chapter 12 ("Sample Lexicon") o f " T h e Major Syntactic Structu- res of English" i Stockwell et al2 discuss the claim, put forward by Ch. Fillmore in "The Case for Case ''3, that it is not necessary to include a feature [_+ stative] in the lexical entries for verbs. The basis for this claim is the observation that the criterial structures for non-stativity (Fillmore mentions the imperative, benefactive expressions and the progressive aspect) are dependent on the presence of an agent in the sentence. 4

S tockwell et al. regard this claim as important"since it would, if correct, support the view that deep cases reflect semantic relations in an economi- cal and non-ad hoc manner" (p. 736). They then proceed to show that Fillmore's contention is incorrect but that it can be patched up. What I want to argue for is that, in its revised form, Fillmore's claim cannot be said to be important, because it is very nearly tautological.

As it stands, Fillmore's claim can be shown to be incorrect on the basis of sentences like a and b (1 lc and 12b in MSSE s, p. 736):

a. This material is losing its sheen b. John is dreaming

Assuming that "John" in b is in the dative case, there is no agent in either a or b, but this does not preclude the occurrence of the progressive.

Stockwell et al.'s patching-up operation is developed along the following lines: the fact that the occurrence of the progressive is a criterion for non-stativity does not entail " that there is no correlation between stativity and lack of agent in the sentence since stativity is not merely a matter of tolerance Jbr the progressive aspect" (p. 736; italics are mine). According to Stockwell etal. the other criteria for stativity are the following (p. 737; to a large extent tNs set is based on LakotFs work6): 1. Imperative 2. Do-something 3. Do-so 4. "Suasion" 5. Agentive Adverbials : 6. In-order-to

*Lose your sheen, material! *What the material did was lose its sheen *This material lost its sheen and that mate- rial did so, too. *I made the material lose its sheen *The material deliberately lost its sheen

Archibald Michiels - The Relation between A g e n t and Stativity 173

*The material lost its sheen in order to be less ostentatious

It appears that if one relies on these six criteria the verb in a is stative, since it fails to pass any of the tests. Stockwell et al. get confused at this point and write "non-stative" when they obviously mean "stative": " I t is clear that by the above criteria (i.e. I through 6-AM) the verbs in (II) (i.e. "lose one's sheen" and other similar problem cases-AM) are non-stative in spite of the fact that they can take the progressive aspect" (p. 737).

On the strength of this observation Stockwell et al. propose to modify Fillmore's claim in the following way: stativity is still predictable on the basis of the absence of an agent in the sentence (so the verb in a is regarded as stative) but the occurrence of the progressive is no longer fully predictable on the basis of stativity. This simply means that the progres- sive is no longer considered as a criterion for dynamicity. Stockwell et al. conclude: "This seems a small price to pay compared with the advantage of predicting stativity on the basis of deep case relationships"7 (p. 739).

It is not easy to take objection to the characterization of stativity that comes out through the rejection of the progressive as a criterion for dynamicity. After all, stativity is a construct and, as long as it is defined with a fair degree of precision (as it is through the assignment of a number of structures as criteria for testing the construct in question), it is pointless to quarrel with the way in which it is defined. However, one can argue that the relation between two constructs (agent and stativity in this case) cannot be taken to be revealing if the two constructs are defined in such a way that there simply has to be a relation between them.

Consider tests 1 ("Imperative"), 4 ("Suasion"), 5 ("Agentive Adver- bials") and 6 ("In-order-to"). It is clear that what they determine is whether the action is under the voluntary control of the subject 8. Now, if the agent is defined (as it is, for instance, in Fillmore's "Types of Lexical Information ''9, p. 376) as the INSTIGATOR of the event, it is no wonder that an agentless structure should fail to pass the four tests mentioned above. This is most clear, obviously, in the case of test 5, where the tautology is apparent in the very way the test is characterized (AGEN- TIVE Adverbials).

Now consider the treatment of the imperative in MSSE. On page 664 the relation between Agent and Imperative is made fully clear: " i t is necessary to block imperative sentences if they ( . . . ) have, as subject, an NP which is not an agent". For somebody who is prepared to accept this constraint on the imperative, in what sense does test 1 provide significant information on stativity? It is a mere reformulation of that constraint. It only shows that agency (to borrow a term from Stockwell et al.) and dynamicity as defined in MSSE overlap to a large extent- for the simple reason that such overlap has been built into their definitions.

It is obvious that this need not be the case. It is possible to devise a

174 ArchibaM Michiels - The Relation between Agent and Stativity

working characterization of dynamicity that is not dependent on agency by definition. Quirk et al. 1~ (p.39) provide such a characterization: "When verbs (either habitually or in certain uses) will not admit the progressive, they are called stative. When they will admit it, they are called dynamic." It is not a coincidence that it is the progressive that is taken as TH E criterion for dynamicity, f fone wants to dissociate agency and dynamicity it seems the obvious thing to do. Suppose one had to set up a collection of criteria for agency: one would probably include among them the four tests for voluntary control, assuming that there can be no voluntary control unless there is an agent to effect it.a ~ But one would not, I suggest, regard the progressive as a criterion; though a relation between agency and the progressive would doubtless be discovered, one would not be able to postulate it as a necessary consequence of the way the two concepts are normally defined. By the same token, it is a matter of observation that stative verbs (as defined in Quirk et al.) generally do not appear in the imperative, in causative constructions, in pseudo-cleft sentences with a DO pro-form, etc. (see Quirk et al., p. 94).

II. In the second part of this paper I intend to take a closer look at the relation between stativity and one of the other two criteria (besides the four discussed above) which are mentioned in MSSE, namely the DO SO construction. Stockwell et al. illustrate the relation between DO SO and stativity with the following unacceptable sentences (p. 737):

c. *The string broke and the rope did so, too d. *The potatoes cooked and the meat did so, too e. *This material lost its sheen and that material did so, too f. *The train arrived and the bus did so, too (15a to 15d in MSSE)

The sentences may not be fully unacceptable - at least in British English (see below) - , but they are undoubtedly deviant. It is not clear, however, whether their deviance can be explained exclusively on the basis of the "stativity" (non-agency) of the verb in the antecedent clauses ("broke" , "cooked" , " los t" and "arrived").

The idea that the DO SO construction cannot substitute for stative verbs was put forward by Lakoff and Ross in their 1966 paper 12, p. 1I-5: "However , DO SO may be substituted only for a verb phrase containing a non-stative verb". There is a footnote referring the reader to Lakoff 1965 ("Irregularity in Syntax") and to Section I of the 1966 report, for an account of the stative vs non-stative distinction. LakotVs set of criteria for non-stativity does include the progressive.

It seems certain that the claim that DO SO cannot substitute for stative verbs should be modified in at least one way: it should be restricted to American English. It does not hold in British English - or, to put it more cautiously, there are many speakers of British English for whom it does not seem to hold. I have been able to find numerous examples in which DO SO substitutes for stative verbs. Let me mention the following, which are

Archibald Michiels - The Relation between Agen t and Stativity 175

all undoubtedly stative for everyone, including Stockwell et al.: know (A. Christie), belong (J. Wyndham), "inert" hear (C.P. Snow), feel (A. Wilson). This difference between British and American English has been pointed out by Quirk et al. (p. 692): verbs like "think", "smell", "hear" (as verbs of inert perception and cognition) allow the DO SO substitution freely in British English, whereas such substitution is odd "to varying degrees" in American English.

The qualification "to varying degrees" is important. It is possible to quote texts that show that even in American English, DO SO - for some speakers at least- sometimes substitutes for stative verbs. The following sentences from "The Psychology of Language" by Fodor, Bever and GarreP 3 have the stative verbs "hold" (in "a relation holds") and "recall" substituted for by DO SO:

g. The basic idea is that whenever the relation of complementary distribution holds between phones belonging to a common phoneme, it does so because the phonetic value of that phoneme depends upon the phonetic environment in which it occurs. (p.35)

h. This is not to deny that subjects CAN recall surface phrase structure; under appropriate circumstances they will undoubtedly do so. (p. 270)

Note also the following sentences from Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ''14, Katz's article "Mentalism in Linguistics" (quoted by Derwing15), Chafe's "Meaning and the Structure of Langua- ge" 16, Fodor's "Troubles about Actions" 17, where the stative verbs are "resemble", "match", "contain" and "paraphrase":

i. More important, the process by which either the individual or the community makes the transition from constrained fall to the pendulum or from dephlogisticated air to oxygen is not one that resembles interpretation. How could it do so in the absence of fixed data for the scientist to interpret? (Kuhn, op. cit., p. 121-122)

j. If the logical consequences of the model match the observable behaviour of the system and would not do so without the hypothesis, the scientist may say that this hypothesis accounts for the behaviour of the system in terms of the behaviour of the unobservable but causally efficient component (Katz, op. cit., p. 244) TM

k. The patient (or complement) of a passive verb usually contains old information but does not do so if there is also a beneficiary in the sentence and that beneficiary contains old information (Chafe, op. cit., p. 222)

1. That is, though the two "i ts" paraphrase the same way, they do so for quite different r e a s o n s . . . (Fodor, op. cit., p. 53)

If g, h, i,j, k and 1 pose a problem even for the modified version of Lakoff and Ross's contention, so do c t h r o u g h f - to the extent that they are deviant - for Quirk et al. Their treatment of DO SO does not explain the difference in acceptability between m and n:

m. Mary cooked and Peter did so too n. The potatoes cooked and the fish did so too

If I understand them rightly, "cooked" is an activity verb in m and a process verb in n (see Quirk et al., p. 95). Now, it appears from the table on page 691 that process verbs, as well as activity verbs, allow DO SO

176 Archibald Michiels - The Relation between Agent and Stativity

substitution freely and no restriction is mentioned in the case of American English. But it is undeniable that there IS a difference in acceptability between m and n and it seems sensible to say that it relates to the two different ways in which "cooked" is used.

University of Likge ARCHIBALD MICHIELS

Notes

1. Stockwell, R.P., Schachter, P. and Hall Partee, 13., The Major Syntactic Structures of English, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1973.

2. Chapter 12 is mostly the work of Ronald Macaulay (assisted by Robert Terry), but as the authors state in the Preface (p. iii) that the final writing has been done by them and that they accept joint responsibility for the whole book, I have chosen to refer to "Stockwell et al." in this paper.

3. Fillmore, Ch., "The Case for Case", in Bach, E. and Harms, R. (eds), Universals in Linguistic Theory, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1%8; see especially p. 31.

4. This is one way to interpret Fillmore's claim. The latter may be ambiguous as to whether the agent is required in the sentence itself or in the case frame associated with the verb whose status is being investigated. David Lee (in "Stative and Case Grammar", Foundations of Language, 10, 1973, p. 545-568) has selected the other interpretation but this obviously causes supplementary problems with case frames in which the agent is optional. The crucial sentence in Fillmore's text is the following: "No special features indicating"stativity" need to be added to verbs, because only those verbs which occur in P(ropositions) containing an A(gent) will show up in those sentences anyway" ("those sentences" = sentences with benefactive expressions, progressive aspect, etc.). The crux is whether "occur" should be read as equivalent to "can occur". It seems fair to assume that if Fillmore had wanted to refer to the case frame of the verb he would have put his contention in terms of the structure of lexical entries, not in terms of "Propositions", which only come into existence at sentence level.

5. MSSE = The Major Syntactic Structures of English (cf. Note 1). 6. Lakoff, G., "Stative Adjectives and Verbs in English" in Report N ~ NSF-17 to the

National Science Foundation, Cambridge, Mass., 1%6. 7. This conchision follows a discussion of Vendler's verb classification, whose relevance to

the problem at hand seems to me highly dubious. To say that 13E+ING indicates "a process of indefinite duration" leaves one with such problem sentences as "John knows the answer", which may lead to the recognition that the key-term in the above is "process" rather than "duration".

8. David Lee (op. cit., p.552) makes the same observation. He further suggests that if we exclude the progressive from the collection of criteria for stativity, we might as well speak of [-AGENTIVE] verbs instead of [+STATIVE] ones.

9. Fillmore, Ch., "Types of Lexical Information" in Steinberg, D. and Jakobovits, L. (eds), Semantics, CUP, 1971.

10. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J., A Grammar of Contemporary English, Longman, London, 1972.

11. But it should be pointed out that D. A. Cruse (in "Some Thoughts on Agentivity" in Journal of Linguistics, 1973, p.11-23) has provided grounds for distinguishing between "volitive" and "agentive".

12. Lakoff, G. and Ross, J. R., "A Criterion for Verb Phrase Constituency" in NSF-17 (see Note 6).

13. Fodor, J. A., Bever, T. G. and Garret, M. F., The Psychology of Language, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974.

14. Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1970 (sec. ed.).

15. Derwing, B. L., Transformational Grammar as a Theory of Language Acquisition, CUP, 1973.

16. Chafe, W. L., Meaning and the Structure of Language, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1970.

Archibald Michiels - The Relation between Agent and Stativity 177

17. Fodor, J. A., "Troubles about Actions" in Harman, G. and Davidson, D. (eds), Semantics of Natural Language, Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1972.

18. Professor Quirk has drawn my attention to the fact that the modals in i a n d j seem relevant (but note that k and I do not have modals). The following pairs of sentences (courtesy of Professor Quirk) can serve to illustrate the difference in acceptability which the presence of a modal brings about in the case of statives like "resemble" and "match": i'. *I thought you resembled your mother but you don't do so i". ?I thought that you resembled your mother but you can't possibly do so because she is really your stepmother j ' . *You said this tie matched my suit but it doesn' t do so j" . ?You said this tie matched my suit but of course it wouldn't do so in this neon-lighting (the acceptability notations are Professor Quirk's).