Structural Constraints and Predication Functions in Language

Abstract

Despite the endeavor in formal syntax and morphology to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical expressions by precise structural constraints, curious phenomena have been occasionally reported where expressions that violate such formal constraints are nonetheless accepted as grammatical, rather than being rejected altogether. Such peculiar cases are customarily regarded as unexplainable exceptions or given vague treatments in pragmatics or functionalism. This paper takes up a variety of such peculiar phenomena in various languages ranging from compounding to passives and reflexives to case marking, and discovers that they all share the semantic function of “property predication” (also called individual-level predication), which expresses a more-or-less permanent and stable characteristic of a nominal entity, instead of “event predication” (also known as stage-level predication), which describes the unfolding of an event or state according to the development of time. It is further observed that compared with their event predication counterparts, such exceptional sentences of property predication suffer decrease in transitivity, as manifested by intransitivization, impersonalization, and non-passivizability. This correlation between the semantic function of property predication and the syntactically degraded transitivity, it is proposed, is captured by the formal mechanism of Event argument suppression, which shifts event predication to property predication and at the same time lowers the transitivity by breaking up the hierarchical relations in argument structure.