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Introducing agents by binding indices: Implications for subjectless presuppositions and agent entailments.

Paper · 2024 · Ryan Walter Smith and Jianrong Yu

Summary

The paper revisits a debate in formal semantics about whether a verb's agent is a true argument of the verb or is added by a separate functional head (Voice, following Kratzer 1996). Bale (2007) used the modifier again as a test. Again can yield a "subjectless" repetitive presupposition, in which the earlier event may have had a different agent. Bale found this reading with eventive transitives like hit and kick, but not with intransitives or stative transitives. He concluded that some verbs take their agent directly.

Smith and Yu add two eventive transitive classes that also block the subjectless reading: ingestion verbs (eat, drink) and intentional killing verbs (murder, massacre). They then argue that such blocking does not force the agent into the verb. Building on Hale & Keyser (2002), they propose that these verbs carry an anaphoric index pointing to their agent. Voice binds that index by shifting the assignment function, using a mechanism Kratzer (2009) proposed for reflexives. Reflexive objects block the subjectless reading in the same way. The result is a middle position: agents are always introduced outside the VP, yet some verbs still track them.

Key points

  • The method is the again diagnostic, applied through constructed minimal contexts with judged felicity; the paper uses no corpus or treebank.
  • Verbs that allow subjectless presuppositions include hit and kick, and their passives also allow it.
  • Verbs that block it include:
    • unergatives such as run;
    • stative transitives;
    • ingestion verbs (eat, drink);
    • intentional killing verbs (murder, massacre).
  • Word order matters: again placed before the subject scopes over the agent, so the earlier event must have had the same agent.
  • A reflexive direct object removes the subjectless reading even from verbs that normally permit it, and this supports the binding analysis.
  • Ordinary lexical entailments about agents do not block the reading. For example, sing entails that the agent's vocal cords move, yet John can sing a song and Bill can then sing it "again".

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper uses a single operator (again) as a probe for which participants belong to an event description, which turns an abstract question about argument structure into concrete felicity judgments.
  • I2. The scope of again depends on its linear position: when it precedes the subject, the agent is included in the presupposition.
  • I3. Reflexive objects and lexically "self-oriented" verbs are treated with one binding mechanism, so both are handled the same way.
  • I4. The paper separates two kinds of agent information: verb-specific facts stored as meaning postulates (such as sing implying vocal-cord movement), and agent reference that other operators can actually see during composition.
  • I5. The evidence takes the form of minimal context pairs where only the agent's identity changes, each paired with a felicity judgment.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): When a text says something happened "again", Mova can decide whether the earlier event must share the agent by checking the verb class. Ingestion and intentional-killing verbs would require the same agent, while hit/kick-type verbs would only require the same theme.
  • I2 (frames): The UD position of an again advmod relative to the nsubj can set the scope of the repetition frame, giving an explainable rule rather than a guess.
  • I3 (frames): Coreference could mark reflexive objects as bound to the agent, and the same binding flag could be attached to verb classes like eat or murder in the role frames.
  • I4 (world): The compiled knowledge layer could keep agent entailments (inference only) apart from agent-binding features (which constrain presuppositions), so that one is not mistaken for the other.
  • I5 (learn): Similar paired items, in which the earlier event has a different agent, could serve as negative controls to check that the system does not over-accept "again" readings.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of ManchesterManchester · United Kingdom87 works · 44,938 citations🎓KU LeuvenLeuven · Belgium42 works · 5,839 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksNeuroscience · 165 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 164 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 138 works

Cite

Cite as Ryan Walter Smith and Jianrong Yu. 2024. Introducing agents by binding indices: Implications for subjectless presuppositions and agent entailments. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.10596

@article{smith2024introducing,
  title = {{Introducing agents by binding indices: Implications for subjectless presuppositions and agent entailments.}},
  author = {Ryan Walter Smith and Jianrong Yu},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.10596},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10596}
}

References

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