Syntax and Semantics of the Swarm Alternation

In the non-base alternant of the swarm alternation, the garden is swarming with bees, a pluractional swarming causes a state of the garden's inside being with bees, the garden being the landmark of the swarming and binding the variable of the inside (69). The pluractional head (66) asks for more atomic subevents than a contextual threshold, so the alternant is quasi-homogeneous, true of every part of its events with enough atomic subevents and of no atom, and atelic, as the in and for adverbials of (14) show. Locatum abundance is asserted and denied by a plain no, while the alternant's scalarity and mirativity (71) are not at issue. Granting that they project, their judgments in neutral contexts and in belief reports put them in the class of projective content with obligatory local effect and no strong contextual felicity constraint. Scalarity clashes with even under negation, which presupposes a low value, (38)–(40). The two contents need heads above tense, so a non-base gerund projects to mirativity where a base one stops at tense, and the adverbs only the former admits are those of the heads in between (§4). Levin's class pages attest the alternation for six of the seven verb classes of (11).

Implementation notes

• (66) counts the atomic proper parts of an event, here its atomic parts, the same above a threshold of one. Quasi-homogeneity takes the swarming to be quasi-homogeneous, the states of central coincidence (64) and the landmark relation to be divisive, and the parts of a causing event to cause parts of its state, as hypotheses; with is where the paper places homogeneity.
• Tonhauser, Beaver, Roberts and Simons classify projective contents, and the paper does not test projection, so the class is this file's inference. The contexts of (30)–(32), a normal count, are neutral about an unusually high one, and the sentences are read without nur so; (50a)'s "isn't a big deal" bears on remarkableness as much as on amount.
• Mirativity is just below Cinque's evaluative mood, the paper's "probably right below", and scalarity just above his past tense (§4.1); "continuative aspect I" is his continuative. Cinque pairs surprisingly with the evaluative mood, so (52)–(53) split his class. Future tense, irrealis mood and the alethic modals are below past tense, so then, perhaps, possibly and necessarily are predicted good in both gerunds.

Errata

• In (67)–(69) the abundance condition counts the parts of e′, free once e′ is reduced away; it is read as counting the parts of e. (67a) applies the one-place v to the PP and to the VP, which enters by event identification.
• The locatum enters (69) only through the result state, so theme abundance does not follow from event abundance as p. 24 says (exists_nonBase_atom); the route through (64) on p. 23 is open.
• (71) relativizes scalarity and mirativity to a parameter S read as the speaker, and leaves w free. (25) and (50) need the attitude holder's evaluation, and no denotation shifts S: with the holder's, (50b) is inconsistent (not_subset_compl_of_image_subset), with the speaker's it is not (exists_speaker_consistent).
• §4.2 has habitual aspect "immediately dominated by T", where Cinque puts future tense, irrealis mood and the alethic modals between. P. 24 dates Dowty's dynamic texture 2000, §3.2 2001, and (55) refers to §3.2.2 for §3.3.2. The bibliography dates Henderson's dissertation 2014 for 2012, and "Dowty (2000: 2)" and "(2001: 6)" fall outside the page ranges it gives.

TODO

• The consider test (25) as the discretionariness that Studies/Coppock2018.lean asks of consider, and the non-atomic locatum of (12) from central coincidence in a spatial model.

References

• Hole & Fraser 2026, Syntax and Semantics of the Swarm Alternation
• Cinque 1999, Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective formalized
• Tonhauser et al. 2013, Toward a Taxonomy of Projective Content formalized
• Krifka 1998, The Origins of Telicity formalized
• Levin 1993, English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation formalized