existence: semantics and syntax - Institut für Linguistik/Germanistik ...

TOWARDS ADYNAMIC ACCOUNT OF BE IN ENGLISH 19
terms of semantic underspecification and pragmatic enrichment, providing be with
an interpretation that is context-dependent and uniform across all usages.
Adopting this hypothesis still leaves the problem of the arity of the underspecified
predicate that is associated with be. That this is a non-trivial problem is shown
by the fact that it appears to be able to take complements of various numbers and
types. So, as the constructions in (1) illustrate, the copula may appear variously
with following definite and indefinite noun phrases, prepositional phrases, present
and past participles and adjectives (amongst others). This flexibility of complement
type is not matched by other auxiliary verbs, including have, compare (13) with
(14).
(13)
a friend of yours
the teacher
in the garden
playing football
A: Kim is disliked by Hannibal
happy
misunderstood
*play cricket
(14)
a friend of yours
the teacher
in the garden
*playing football
A: Kim has *disliked by Hannibal
*happy
misunderstood
*play cricket
(ellipsis only)
This variability in apparent complement type presents quite a serious problem in
trying to establish the syntactic properties of the copula, leading in frameworks
like GPSG (and HPSG) to the postulation of syntactic homonymy for be. 8 If be
is semantically non-homonymous, however, syntactic homonymy should also be
excluded and I take the data given above to indicate be is uniformly intransitive
and that it licenses no complements directly. This position is further supported by
the data in (15) below. Uses of be can give rise to a non-elliptical interpretation in
intransitive contexts, unlike other auxiliaries. So, for example, may and can without
VP complements, do not license interpretations where the general modality, such
as possibility and ability, are ascribed to the subject. Without a complement VP,
modals can only be interpreted elliptically, whereas, as we have already seen, be
can give rise to a non-elliptical interpretation of existence in intransitive contexts.
This strongly indicates that there is no necessary ‘complement position’. 9
8 See Gazdar et al. 1982 and Warner 1993.
9 Lamarche 2003 comes to essentially the same conclusion, though for very different reasons.