The Case for Thematically Underspecified External Arguments

The Case for Thematically Underspecified External Arguments Tomokazu Takehisa Niigata University of Pharmacy and Applied Life Sciences 265-1 Higashijima, Akiha-ku, Niigata 956-8603, Japan takehisa@nupals.ac.jp Abstract This paper argues that external arguments are introduced as thematically underspecified and their thematic interpretation is determined at the C-I interface based on their context of occurrence. Specifically, this paper first argues for the underspecified nature of external arguments by showing the facts concerning the distribution of interpretationally variable arguments, and it then argues that the analysis invoking thematic underspecification fares better than those assuming different heads responsible for different interpretations. 1 Introduction In their influential 1993 paper, “Deriving Causation,” Ritter and Rosen discuss the sentence as in (1), where the subject can be interpreted in two ways, as a causer or an experiencer. In (1), have adds a peripheral participant to the event described by its complement. (1) John had his students walk out of class. At the core of their analysis is the assumption that have introduces an argument but does not assign its own theta-role to that argument, whose interpretation is determined at LF (or at the C-I interface under current conceptions) based on have and its complement. This analysis of have is in line with the well- known observation that the interpretation of an external argument is dependent on the composition of its predicate (Chomsky, 1981; Marantz, 1984; Kratzer, 1996). Moreover, the analysis takes one step further in assuming that there is a dedicated head that introduces a thematically underspecified argument. The aim of this paper is to show that a head like have is more pervasive than previously thought. Specifically, I argue that a head introducing an external argument introduces a thematically underspecified argument, which receives interpretation depending on the context of occurrence (cf. Bowers, 1993; Wood and Marantz, 2017). This can be illustrated as in (2), where H is a head introducing a thematically underspecified argument (DP) and vP is a verb phrase: (2) In the simplest case, vP is sufficient to specify the interpretation of DP. For instance, if vP denotes an activity, DP is interpreted as an agent at the C-I interface. Moreover, if vP does not serve to resolve the thematic underspecification, the interpretive procedure applies as a last resort at the interface, respecting thematic uniqueness (Carlson, 1984). The paper is organized as follows: in section 2, we will argue for the underspecified nature of external arguments by showing the facts concerning the distribution of interpretationally variable subject arguments. In section 3, we will further show that the analysis invoking underspecification and thematic uniqueness fares HP  DP  H vP PACLIC 32 658 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by the author better than those assuming different heads for different interpretations. After briefly introducing the interpretive procedure that serves to resolve thematic underspecification (Takehisa, 2014, 2016) in section 4, section 5 summarizes the paper. 2 Interpretational Variability 2.1 Causative Alternation External arguments may vary as …

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