Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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KENNETH LOCKE HALE
KENNETH LOCKE HALE
Pages 114-149
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Photograph by J
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Growing up on the family ranch, Hale came in contact with speakers of Native American languages and discovered that he had an extraordinary talent for acquiring languages quickly and thoroughly, a talent that he was fortunate to retain throughout his life. Hale did his undergraduate work in anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
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Hale was sensitive to the unequal relationship that often obtains between researchers, who usually have enormous material resources at their command, and the individuals whose languages are being studied, who often are barely surviving on the margins of our modern world. He was deeply concerned about "the sheer lethal incompatibility between the dominant Anglo-Saxon people's empire and an Aboriginal society of almost inconceivable antiquity,"1 and he made major efforts to provide tangible benefits to the groups whose languages he was studying.
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One important result of the work of the last half century is the conclusion that the grammars of languages do not vary virtually without limit, as had been widely assumed; rather, the cross-linguistic differences that we find are all variations on a theme, with a common core of linguistic properties that appear to be universal in human language. On one widely held view (subscribed to by Hale and the authors)
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From page 118... ...
On this view, the subject matter of linguistics is the nature of the human mind, of this neurophysiological machinery which is part of what makes us human, as revealed in the patterns of the languages of the world. This approach to human language began with Noam Chomsky's pioneering work in the 50's, and has driven several decades of fruitful work in linguistics -- work to which Ken Hale made profound and varied contributions.
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From page 119... ...
Transitive verbs like devour require a direct object, while intransitive verbs like faint cannot occur with an object. In some cases, the demands imposed on the structure by the verb may be more elaborate than this; verbs like put, for example, require the presence not only of a direct object but of a locative prepositional phrase as well, as (3)
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Must the properties of argument structure be restated for each language, or are there principles that hold universally? One of the important results of the work of the last half century is that the properties of argument structure across languages do not simply vary without limit, but are narrowly constrained by general principles of Universal Grammar.
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[transitive] By contrast, the intransitive verbs in (6-7)
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Leets'aa' sé-l -ts'il dish 3.1s l shatter.PERF ‘I shattered the dish' With another class of verbs, the transitive cannot be formed so simply; this latter class includes Navajo verbs like the ones meaning laugh and cough. With these verbs, more complex structures, roughly analogous to the English ones in (8)
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. In all three of these unrelated languages, then, some intransitive verbs may be made transitive, while others may not.
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We are confronted, then, with a question: what constrains the ability of verbs to alternate between transitive and intransitive versions? We have seen that the answer to this question cannot be based on facts that are peculiar to English; what is needed is a theory that predicts that a verb that means cough, whatever language it finds itself in, will be unable to take a direct object, while a verb that means float will be able to do so.
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In particular, they attributed this more complex structure to the second, non-transitivizable type of intransitive verb (including verbs with meanings like laugh and cough)
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Languages vary in how much material may be put in a single word; we often find that one language communicates with a single word what another language requires several words to express. The Mohawk verb in (14a)
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We can use negation, then, to see what kind of morphology appears on an English verb; whatever morpheme it is, it should appear on do when the verb is negated. Applying this diagnostic to put, we see that this verb does have a past tense morpheme attached to it when it is in the past tense, although this morpheme idiosyncratically fails to be pronounced on this particular verb: (17)
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This way of depicting the structure allows us to account for the fact that the verb and its object are treated as a unit by a number of syntactic operations, unlike the verb and its subject. We will give just one such operation as an example.
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(21) Mary VP bought a car Associating the words of this sentence with a tree of this kind amounts to a claim about which word sequences are units that syntactic operations may affect; in particular, it illustrates that only sequences that are exhaustively dominated by single nodes in the tree are syntactic units.
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We see these discoveries as providing boundary conditions that the neurology of the future must satisfy. HALE'S ANSWER: DERIVED INTRANSITIVITY We can now consider Hale and Keyser's proposal about the nature of the untransitivizable intransitive verbs (e.g., laugh, cough)
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. Because they are already transitive, they cannot be "transitivized" as other, truly intransitive verbs can.
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The claim made and defended by Hale and Keyser is that some verbs -- in particular, verbs of the laugh class -- are stored in speakers' memories with complex structures of this type. In their approach, such verbs are not simply atomic units; rather, they consist of a verb with little semantic content (referred to in the literature as a "light verb," and represented here with the English verb did)
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Since all of us share the same neurophysiology, it is hardly surprising that all languages are constructed on principles of a single kind, those of Universal Grammar. Hale and Keyser's proposal is that properties of Universal Grammar guarantee that verbs with meanings like laugh and spit will be, on some level, transitive verbs.
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In Basque, by contrast, these verbs are both underlyingly transitive and surface transitive. Similarly, it will be useful for us to distinguish between the underlying object and the surface object of a verb; laugh, for instance, has an underlying object in its representation in the speaker's memory, but no surface object in a language like English (while in Basque, the underlying object of this verb is also its surface object)
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sentences. It would seem that making these verbs transitive involves adding a subject, who is described as causing an event to happen: Mary, for example, in (28b)
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, not because of properties of the verb break, but simply because the clause must have a subject and the hammock is the only available noun phrase. Verbs like break and melt invariably take an underlying object, which denotes something that has undergone a change of state as a result of the event described by the verb: (31)
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d. the butter VP John VP melted melted the butter This conclusion about the nature of the intransitive verbs of this class -- that their surface subjects are actually underlying objects -- has a long tradition in syntactic theory, and is richly supported by data gathered by Hale and others from a variety of languages.
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refer to underlying objects or to surface objects. Let us consider the interaction of these resultatives with the different types of intransitive verbs.
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These are the two classes of intransitive verbs that Hale and Keyser are concerned with; verbs like laugh and spit underlyingly have direct objects that ultimately become part of the verb, while verbs like break and melt have direct objects which change into subjects. The facts in (36-37)
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For these verbs, the underlying object of the verb becomes part of the verb, yielding a surface intransitive verb: (40)
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The account therefore correctly divides surface intransitive verbs into two types; verbs like break, which can be transitivized by adding a subject, and verbs like laugh, which are in fact already transitive and therefore cannot be transitivized. Hale's typology of verbs involves two main principles (43)
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c. If a verb has no underlying subject, the underlying object may become the surface subject, as inThe sword broke in (41)
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Why must verbs have underlying objects? What properties of agents constrain their syntactic behavior?
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Hale worked on historical reconstruction of the Australian language families, on intonation in Tohono O'odham, on stress in Hocak, on agreement in ‘ Irish and K'ichee,' on the phonology and semantics of a sacred initiation language of the Lardil called Damin, and on countless syntactic issues in languages from Warlpiri to Dagur to Navajo. He produced dictionaries of Lardil and of Ulwa, and contributed extensively to a dictionary of Warlpiri, and to educational materials in countless other endangered languages.
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Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian Languages. Ogmios 2.5, no 17, summer 2001, p.3 2.The name is perhaps an unfortunate one, since it is not intended to refer to the grammar of any particular language, but rather to properties which universally hold of human languages.
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1973 Person marking in Warlpiri. In A Festschrift for Morris Halle, eds.
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Some transitivity alternations in English. Lexicon Project Working Papers 7.
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148 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1989 With L
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1998 On endangered languages and the importance of linguistic diver sity. In Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response, eds.
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