The Subject-Predicate Theory of There

The Subject-Predicate Theory of ThereAuthor(s): Edwin WilliamsSource: Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 648-651Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4179388 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 19:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Linguistic Inquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.177 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 19:40:02 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4179388?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


648 REMARKS AND REPLIES

The Subject-Predicate Theory of There

Edwin Williams

The "associate" NP in the English existential there-construction is a predicative NP, and there is its subject.

Keywords: there, existential, predication

Hazout (2004) presents a theory of existential there-sentences no different in intent or substance from that presented in Williams 1994:134-137. The principle that underlies both analyses, and drives all the explanations in both accounts, is this:

(1) The expletive and its associate instantiate the subject-predicate relation.

Hazout's (2004) version of (1) is "this NP [the associate] is a predicate with respect to its thematic status as well as its syntactic positioning and function" (pp. 394-395) "with expletive there as its subject" (p. 393). The version in Williams 1994 is "I conclude from these considerations that the indefinite NP is a predicate, and that there is its subject" (p. 137). Hazout apparently fails to realize that his account replicates not only the proposal made in Williams 1994 but also its role in explaining the principal features of the existential there-construction.

Hazout's implementation of the subject-predicate relation is trivially different from that found in Williams 1994. The former involves feature percolation and the "XP-internal subject hypothesis" whereas the latter uses index percolation; however, this difference is orthogonal to (1) as an account of existential sentences. In two sentences, Hazout does address the question of whether the proposals are substantively different, and I will return to these remarks. First, however, I want to show that the identity of the two proposals is not a superficial one based on shared terminology, because too often confusion arises when two accounts happen to use the same term (e.g., predicate) but use it in different contexts where it functions differently and affords different explanations. In this case, Hazout's proposal operates identically to mine in deriving explanations for the facts about existential sentences. In Williams 1994, I show that mysterious gaps in the there-insertion paradigm can be reduced to the fact that in those instances the expletive and the associate are not in a valid subject-predicate relation, where the notion of valid subject-predicate relation can be independently established. Hazout's explanations are identical in every way.

In Williams 1994, I give four different kinds of arguments for (1): some based on locality and the occurrence of predicate nominals, one based on extraction, one based on ellipsis, and one based on scope. Hazout repeats, without citation, arguments of the first type. For example, in Williams 1994, I write:

In order for there insertion sentences not to violate the Theta Criterion, it is not enough to say that the indefinite NP is a predicate; for if it is, it must have a subject. The only candidate is there. Suppose that there is the subject. The immediate benefit is that the close relationship between there and the indefinite NP is exactly the relation that must hold between any predicate and its subject.... And factually, this seems to be the case: the relation between there and its NP is neither more nor less local than the relation between any predicate and its subject. (p. 136)

Linguistic Inquiry, Volume 37, Number 4, Fall 2006 648-651 ?) 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology



REMARKS AND REPLIES 649

In discussing (2),

(2) *There seems that a man is in the room. (Hazout 2004:418, (58b))

Hazout postulates that there are barriers to the percolation of agreement features from a man to the position of there in (2) and that these barriers account for the sentence's ungrammaticality. This feature percolation is the basis for his account of the subject-predicate relation. But of course he could have picked any other means of instantiating the relation. While there are differences between his account and mine in how the subject-predicate relation itself is instantiated, there is no difference in how this example is explained: in general, the subject-predicate relation cannot hold between the positions that there and the NP a man occupy in this example, and so the there ... associate relation is also ungrammatical. Likewise for the following case:

(3) *There seems a man to be in the room. (Hazout 2004:419, (62))

This sentence is ungrammatical, under the account in Williams 1994, because a man does not occupy a possible predicate position. Hazout makes the same assumption, and so rules out the example in the same way.

In Williams 1994, I further show that (1) implies the existence of "presentational" noncopu- lar kinds of there-sentences.

(4) a. There came into the room a man. b. *There came a man into the room. c. John arrived a fool (but left a wise man).

(Williams 1994:138, (59a-b), (61))

The difference between (4a) and (4b) shows that the indefinite associate is not in the VP, but in an adjunct position; (4c) shows how that position is used for ordinary adjunct predication of the subject. The parallelism between (4a) and (4c) contributes to the confirmation of (1).

Hazout's discussion centers on the following similar but less informative example:

(5) There seems to have arrived a man from New York. (Hazout 2004:417, (56a))

Hazout incorrectly identifies the position of the indefinite in (5) as a complement of the verb arrive (it "is otherwise configurationally situated in a way characteristic of predicate nominals"; see p. 417, and see also diagram (57) on the same page). Despite the mistake, the substance of Hazout's discussion of this example is the same as the cited discussion in Williams 1994. The mistake is worth setting right because it is crucial to comparing the predicate theory with the theory proposed in Chomsky 2000, as I suggest at the end of this reply.

Now, what is the substantive difference between the proposals offered in Williams 1994 and Hazout 2004? At only one point in his presentation does Hazout seek to distinguish my theory from his, and there he does so by attributing to my account properties that it demonstrably does



650 REMARKS AND REPLIES

not have. He writes:

Williams (1994) suggests that sentences like [There was a problem, There were students who were not interested in English syntax, and There is a big problem] involve a "normal subject-predicate relation" (p. 135) and therefore do not violate the 0-Criterion, "though it is not clear why they do not" (p. 134).... Although I believe that the intuition behind Williams's suggestion is on the right track, I find the idea that there ... is assigned a 0-role in the usual way, and therefore satisfies the 0- Criterion, somewhat difficult to accept.' (p. 397)

His objection is that if the subject-predicate relation is an "aboutness" relation, then this view conflicts with the observation that there-sentences, among others, "do not involve the attribution of a property to some entity" (p. 398). But I never held the view that he attributes to me; specifically, I raise (but do not answer) "the question of what it means for the nonreferential there to be the subject of the predicative NP, and ... the existential interpretation of the clause" (p. 137). Clearly, I did not intend that there-sentences involve "the attribution of a property to some entity." Rather, I intended that there contributes the existential component of the interpretation: there binds the open variable that makes the predicative NP a predicate, thereby satisfying the 0-Criterion.

Hazout claims that his account differs from mine on what the content of the subject-predicate relation is, but it is not at all clear that it does, as he never explains how there-sentences square with the 0-Criterion. What is clear, though, is that it doesn't matter. Both accounts are based not on the content of that relation, but on two things: (a) that we know approximately how that relation is implemented in syntax, and (b) that the there . . . associate relation is one instantiation of that relation; from this everything else follows.

Hazout compares the predicate theory of there-sentences with the probe-goal theory proposed by Chomsky (2000, 2001), and he rightly concludes that Chomsky's treatment is inferior. How- ever, Hazout' s failure to analyze the examples in (4) correctly prevents him from making an even stronger argument against Chomsky's analysis of there. In fact, (4a) is exactly the example that forces Chomsky (2001) to posit "Th/Ex," a language-particular transformation, to square the form predicted by his theory, (4b), with the form that actually occurs, (4a), whereas the theory of there proposed in Williams 1994 and in this reply directly predicts that only (4a) should occur. If the predicate theory of there is correct, then the apparatus of multiple probing by a single probe

I The last part of Hazout's quotation from Williams 1994 is taken out of context and thereby given a misleading interpretation. The full quotation is this:

As a step toward a new theory, I propose to start with the observation that there insertion sentences do not violate the Theta Criterion, though it is not clear why they do not:

(48) a. There is a god. b. There was [a man eating leaves]NP.

In (48a) a god is not the argument of any predicate, so this sentence should violate the Theta Criterion. (p. 134)

In the full context, it is clear that I am not declaring that I do not understand why there-insertion sentences do not violate the 0-Criterion; rather, I am identifying a problem for the 0-Criterion based on example (48a); I then go on to say that that problem extends to examples like (48b), if it has the structure indicated, instead of the usual small clause structure. Hazout makes the same point himself on pages 395-396 in connection with his examples (5) and (6), but without citation.



REMARKS AND REPLIES 651

developed in Chomsky 2001 needs reevaluation, as it is based almost entirely on a different analysis of there.

References

Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, ed. by Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89-155. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1-52. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hazout, Ilan. 2004. The syntax of existential constructions. Linguistic Inquiry 35:393-430. Williams, Edwin. 1994. Thematic structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

029 East Pyne Building Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey 08544

edwin @princeton. edu



Documents

The Subject-Predicate Theory of There