Kim (2024): On the Argument Structure of Object Experiencer Verbs #

This file formalizes the Uniform Projection Hypothesis of [Kim24] for the object-experiencer verbs, [BR88]'s Class II. Like causatives in general, every such verb projects just a Cause and an Experiencer. The standard view since [Pes95] adds a Target or Subject Matter as a third role. On the uniform view, the eventive–stative ambiguity that runs through the class does not come from the arguments projected. It comes from what the Cause refers to. An emotion arises along a causal chain, (185): the Experiencer evaluates a percept, the evaluation yields a subject matter, the Experiencer's mind-internal counterpart of the percept, and attention to the subject matter gives rise to the emotion. The eventive reading denotes the whole chain, its Cause the percept, and the stative reading the compact chain from the subject matter on, a maintenance relation: The doctor's letter worried John against His declining health worried John.

The thesis reads three properties off where the Cause sits on this chain.

A reading is eventive when its chain contains the evaluation, the change that brings a new subject matter into being, which is when the Cause names the percept (EmotionChain.isEventive_iff).
The subject is intensional when the Cause is mind-internal. The mind-internal causes are the members of the chain past the percept, so intensionality and stativity coincide (EmotionChain.isMindInternal_iff_not_isEventive). Chapter 4 reports this correlation as a new finding.
The Onset Condition (316) maps every causal participant of a causal predicate to the onset of the chain the predicate denotes (OnsetCondition). The thesis motivates it on causatives in general: events integrated into one predicate coincide, so a causal by-phrase is controlled by the Cause (OnsetCondition.eq), and an event downstream of the onset cannot be integrated (not_onsetCondition_of_lt), as in *John killed the water deer by the poacher shooting them (not_onsetCondition_shooting). On the eventive reading the subject matter lies downstream of the percept, so a Subject Matter cannot join the Cause (tsm_restriction), while it heads the chain of a predicate without a Cause (subjectMatter_onset_without_cause). The T/SM restriction thus follows without a ban of its own, and the thesis rules out a Target alongside a Cause just as [Pes95] does (tsm_restriction_agrees).

Implementation notes #

The Onset Condition is stated for any causal chain, a set of events partially ordered by causal precedence, whose onset is its least event, IsLeast. Each chain of the thesis is drawn as a relation of immediate causation (Causes), and ordered by its reflexive transitive closure. The chain of an emotion is EmotionChain, and the chain a Class II predicate denotes is the final segment Set.Ici from the member its Cause refers to. The thesis finds no reliable diagnostic that tells Target from Subject Matter and calls every object of emotion a Subject Matter, so both of [Pes95]'s stimulus types refer to the one member EmotionChain.subjectMatter. The agentive reading, which the thesis sets aside with the literature, is not represented.

TODO #

The maintenance relation that the stative reading denotes, (148), is not formalized: its maintaining eventuality is contemporaneous with the maintained state, which continues only as long as the maintaining eventuality does. The Onset Condition is stated here over the members of the chain, and on the stative reading the Cause itself refers to the subject matter. Excluding a Subject Matter adjunct there needs participants mapped to eventualities rather than to members of the chain. The thesis derives the restriction for a Cause that refers to the percept (§5.3).

Kim (2024): On the Argument Structure of Object Experiencer Verbs #

Implementation notes #

TODO #

References #

The Onset Condition #

A killing, (312)–(314) #

The causal chain of an emotion #

The T/SM restriction #

The comparison with Pesetsky (1995) #