Of Minds and Language (26 page)

P
IATTELLI
-P
ALMARINI
: You presented
walks quickly
as an example, and you say something to the effect that there is no projection, or a defective one. What about adverbs, the hierarchy of different kinds of adverbs as detailed by Guglielmo Cinque in a variety of languages and dialects.
¹¹
They each have to be inserted in a certain position in the hierarchy.
Frequently walks quickly
not
quickly walks frequently
. How do you deal with that?

H
INZEN
: I think that adjuncts form a class that comprises much more complex phenomena than those I evoked, and maybe adjuncts do play a crucial role in argument structure and the hierarchy of the clause. All I'm committed to is that arguments are quite radically different from adjuncts, and that within the combinatorics of language you have one very, very simple combinatorial system, which is like the one I described: it is iterative and it has an extremely simple conjunctive semantics. The adjunctal hierarchies are for real, but maybe one need not spell out or explain them in terms of phrase structure, if they are more semantic in nature. I don't think that the notion of an adjunct captures a unified phenomenon necessarily.

James Higginbotham

The two interfaces that I will be talking about are (i) the interface between syntax and semantics, and (ii) the interface between what I call
linguistic semantics
(the stuff we do ordinarily, in Departments of Linguistics) and more philosophical questions about semantics – philosophical in the classical sense of raising questions about the nature of truth, and the relations of what we say to the world that we live in.

To begin with the first interface, the structure of syntax, and the relations of syntax to semantics, there has been a certain amount of literature in the last several years on the notion of compositionality. Some of this literature is highly mathematical. Some have argued that compositionality is trivial, that you can always meet that requirement; others have argued that you cannot really meet it, or you can meet it only if you include some fancy syntactic and semantic categories, and so forth. I actually think that those investigations are a little beside the empirical point of compositionality.

The basic idea of compositionality at work in current research is that semantics is locally computed, in that only a certain amount of information is used at each point. I can illustrate the thesis as follows. Consider this tree structure:

The root is the element Z, which is made up of X and Y. There are perhaps other things going on above Z, as well as things going on below both X and Y. If we are given certain information about the formal features of X and Y, and possibly also of Z, and we suppose that we have the semantics of X and Y available
somehow, then the thesis is that the interpretation of Z, for any tree whatsoever in which the configuration may occur, is strictly determined by what you obtained when you got X and what you obtained when you got Y, plus those formal features. The local determination of the value of Z immediately rules out linguistic systems in which (for instance) Z refers to me if there is mention of horses four clauses down in Y, and it refers to you otherwise. That semantics is perfectly coherent, but it is not compositional in my sense. Compositionality also rules out the possibility that to get the interpretation of Z you may look ahead or “peek up” at what is higher in the tree.

Compositionality, so considered, is an empirical hypothesis, and we can test it – and in fact I think it is false. I had a long paper a while back showing that, barring special assumptions, it is even false for certain conditional sentences “
B
if
A
” (Higginbotham 2003a). The hypothesis of compositionality does however have the property of an analogous generalization that Noam mentioned to me years ago. He remarked that we all learned to say that a noun refers to a person, place, or thing. That really isn't true, Noam observed, but it is very close to being true. Similarly, compositionality should be thought of as a working hypothesis which can be assumed to be close to being true, but maybe not quite true. In terms of the present discussion, one might conjecture further that compositionality, in the sense of this very simple computation of semantics, comes in as a hypothesis that may not be peculiar to language at all – it may belong to systems of various sorts – and then the area where compositionality breaks down could be very specific to language, and in that sense special.

In one standard way of thinking about direct quotation, compositionality already breaks down. Consider (1):

(1)    Massimo said, “I'm sitting down.”

We have to say that, if I speak truly in saying (1), then the words in quotation marks refer to the very words that came out of Massimo's mouth. I myself think that the same is true in indirect quotation. So for example if I say (2) (where I have put the complementizer
that
in, so the quotation must be indirect):

(2)    Massimo said that I am standing

then that first person pronoun
I
refers to me, just as if I were using it in isolation. However, I hold that the sentence
I'm standing
in (2) actually refers to itself, analogously to direct quotation, but
understood as if it were said
. That is why the word I continues to refer to me, just as it would if I said it in isolation.

The doctrine that indirect quotation is self-referential is sententialism (Steve Schiffer's useful term; Schiffer 2003). If the doctrine is correct, then compositionality has a certain limit, at the point at which we talk about the thoughts,
wants, etc. of ourselves and other people. That doesn't mean that the semantics can't be given – on the contrary – but it can't be locally computed.

So I am interested in the compositionality question. I am also interested in linguistic parameters that might operate on the syntax–semantics side. For example, I am interested in the difference between languages like English and Chinese, on the one hand, which have resultative constructions (things like
wipe the table clean
or
come in
, etc.) and languages like Italian, Spanish, or Korean in which you don't have these constructions. Practically speaking they do not exist in those languages, and the question is: how come? Because after all, it is not as if Italians can't say
wipe the table clean
; they just can't say it that way. And I think that, if anything, the answer to this question is related to the fact that one system of languages, including the Italian and Korean, has very rich morphology, whereas English, with its cut-down morphology, can do the semantic work required for a resultative interpretation only in the syntax.

So think of it in the following way. It is an old piece of wisdom in generative grammar that in
wipe the table clean
, somehow the verb
wipe
and the adjective clean have to get together in some way. Let's suppose that they do that by a semantic process, which I won't describe here, which I call telic pair formation (Higginbotham 2000), and which I have elaborated partly in response to some arguments of Jerry Fodor's. The words
wipe
and
clean
get together in some way, through a semantic rule which takes an activity predicate,
wipe
, and a predicate of result, clean, and it puts them together to form a single unitary accomplishment predicate. In an accomplishment predicate you encode both process and end, so in
wipe clean
, you have
wipe
as the process and
clean
as the end of the activity. That is what you can do in English, and it is what you can do in Chinese, but that is what you cannot do (with some few exceptions) in Italian, Spanish, French, or Korean.

In fact, if you are a native speaker of English, you can as it were even hear the difference between the two types of languages, English and Chinese on the one hand, and Romance and Korean on the other. We have complex predicates in English in ordinary expressions such as
come in
. We also have the word
enter
, practically synonymous with
come in
, at least as far a truth conditions go. But every native speaker of the English language knows that the true English expression is
come in
, not
enter
:
enter
is a learned word (as it comes from Latin), it's more formal, and so forth. So English is a
come in
language, and Italian is an
enter
language. Similarly, English is a
give up
language, and Italian is a
resign
language.

If this is right, there is a little lesson to be learned, because there will be a difference between languages with respect to what you are allowed to do in the semantic computation. This difference will spill over into the lexicon, implying
that words that may be found in one language can't exist in another. An example might be the absence of anything like the goal-driven preposition
to
in Italian, Korean, French, etc. You can't in these languages say that you walk to the store: the relevant word
to
is missing. The thought I would pursue (which agrees, I believe, with parts of what Ray Jackendoff has written, and what he has told me in personal communication) is that in
walk to the store
, it is just the word to that is the predicate of motion, whereas
walk
functions as a sort of adverb. It's as if one were saying:
I got to the store walkingly
. There are many similar examples. But if in Italian and similar languages that kind of semantics can't be computed, then no analogue of the English
to
can exist.

Korean speakers and linguists that I have interviewed (Professor Dong-Whee Yang and other native informants) tell me that there is exactly one verb you can say
V to the store
with, and that is the verb meaning
go
, which is presumably the empty verb. As soon as you go to a verb of motion that has some more substantial meaning to it, it is simply impossible. You can
go to the store
, but you can't
walk to the store
. So why does this happen? The explanation may be that in English you have something that is not the syntactic head, namely the preposition
to
, and you have something that is the syntactic head, namely the verb
walk
, but the semantic head, the thing that is carrying the burden of the sentence, is the preposition
to
, not the verb
walk
. And so you might suppose that English tolerates a kind of mismatch, in the sense that the syntactic head and the semantic head need not coincide, whereas in these languages they must coincide. As soon as they must coincide, we have an explanation of why you could not have in Italian or Korean preposition a with the meaning of the English preposition to. As soon as it was born, it would have to die, because there would have to be a certain semantic computation taking place with respect to it, and that computation couldn't happen. If that is anywhere near the right track, then it indicates a kind of limit for the view that languages really differ only lexically, because if what I have produced is a reasonable argument, it would follow that the lexical absence of
to
in Italian is principled. It is not just that it does not have it, it couldn't have it, because the principles that would be required in order to make it operate are disallowed (Higginbotham 2000).

So this is one side of a set of what I find interesting questions. How much of compositionality really belongs to general features of computation, and how much of it belongs specifically to language? In which places in human languages does compositionality break down? Also, what differences between languages should be explained in terms of parameters that act at the interface between syntax and semantics?

The second interface that I want to consider here concerns the relation between what the linguistic semantics seems to deliver, and what there is in the world. In Wolfram Hinzen's talk (see page 137 above), he gave for example the semantics of the combination
walk quickly
using the original formulation due to Donald Davidson, as
walk(e)
and
quickly(e)
, where e is a variable ranging over events (Davidson 1967). And if I understood him correctly, he was trying to have this account of modification but not eat the consequences. That is to say, he endorsed a semantics where (3) is true just in case there is an event which is a walking by John, and quick.

(3)    John walked quickly

But he didn't think there were individual events in Davidson's sense.

I think this won't do. If the interpretation of (3) is given as:
there is an event (e), it is a walking by John, and it is quick
, one cannot then turn around and say, “Oh, but I don't really believe in events.” The semantic theory you are endorsing just gave you that result. It is no good saying that you are doing semantics on the one hand, but on the other hand you are really only talking.