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<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>rothstein</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY Background="hp-bg5.gif" link="#FF0000">
<center><B>Predicational 'BE'
</B></center><br>
<br>
<center><B>Susan Rothstein</B>
<br>
<B>Bar-Ilan University<br>
<i><a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a></i></B></center><br>
<br>
<br>
I present a unified account of the meaning of predicational 'be'
which explains its behaviour both in simple predicational sentences
such as (1) and so-called 'agentive' contexts such as (2):<br>
<table>
<tr>
<td align=left valign=top>
(1)
</td>
<td></td>
<td>
Mary is very clever.<br>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table>
<tr>
<td align=left valign=top>
(2)
</td>
<td></td>
<td>
(a) Mary is being very clever.<br>
(b) She made Mary be very clever.<br>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
The account rests on identifying a fundamental aspectual dichotomy
between verbs and adjectives: verbs have a davidsonian eventuality
argument and denote sets of atomic, countable eventuality elements.
Adjectives have their denotation in the mass domain, and denote
sets of non-atomic states. I argue that BE, like all verbs,
introduces a davidsonian eventuality argument, but that, being a
copula, it doesn't ascribe any property to that eventuality or
determine any participants via theta-marking. Instead it has the
role of mapping from the mass to the count domain: it takes as an
argument a set of states, denoted by AP, and yields a set of
eventualities which instantiate the set of states, in other words,
eventualities in which the states hold. I represent the meaning of
BE as in (3), where S is a variable over sets of states:<br>
<table>
<tr>
<td align=left valign=top>
(3)
</td>
<td></td>
<td>
$S$e.Inst(e,S) ("$" = lambda)<br>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
Eventualities, including those denotated by complex verbs of the
form BE + AP, have a number of properties which true states do not
have, indicating the 'count' status of the former; in particular,
they can be temporally located and counted. <br>
<br>
I show that the semantic distinction between the denotations
of AP and [be+ AP] allows us to explain the agentivity effects in
(2) as a pragmatic effect resulting from the interaction of the
small clause and progressive constructions respectively with the
semantic properties of BE.
<br>
<br>
<HR>
<br>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD>
<a href="mailto:[email protected]"><FONT COLOR="FF00FF"><IMG SRC="tls-1.gif"alt=""></FONT></a></TD>
<td></td>
<TD>
<em>Last updated July 20, 1997 by</em><br>
<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>
<br>
Return to <a href=program.html >main program</a></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
<br>
<br>
</BODY>
</HTML>