Killing it, pt 2

Let us call what we’re doing in (1c) above (see “Killing it, pt 1”) characterization—here I am borrowing from the linguistic anthropologist Shunsuke Nozawa. (1a) has a touch of it: in English, where lexical causatives are common, it is difficult not to hear light verb causatives as conveying intention, or at least this is how I hear them (compare the use of make as a coercive auxiliary, as in They made us line up to have our photo taken). Perhaps even (1b) is tinged with characterization, depending on your history with the verb destroy. And perhaps part of why the force of characterization feels so much stronger in (1c) than in (1a–b) has to do not with the semantics of the verbs in question but with those of the agents: rain and fire, even when made denumerable with the definite article the, feel topologically less apt for characterization than that shirt. Both shirtness and the demonstrative that contribute to the sense that we are dealing here with a particular individual. Compare:

   3. (a)  That rain made me late.
      (b)  That fire destroyed the village.

Here the use of the demonstrative that imbues the agent with greater individuality, and the sense of characterization is correspondingly stronger—at least to my ear.

Further examples of characterization:

    4. (a)  Seeing a packet of miso sitting out on the counter:
            Did you stay out all night?
       (b)  Retrieving a vitamin capsule that has rolled away:
            Oh, you think you can get away, do you?
       (c)  To a potted Physalis:
            You sure you don’t want a drink?
       (d)  Completing a round of sprints:          
            (Pats injured knee) Good job.

Second-person address is common in characterization, but not obligatory:

    4. (e)  This paperbark wishes it would rain.
       (f)  Where does the rice vinegar live?

(4f) will concern us further. Let’s place it in a comparative context.

    5. (a)  Where do you live?
       (b)  That pardalotte out back—where do they live?
       (c)  Where does the rice vinegar live?

(5c) differs from (5a–b) in a way that feels similar to how (1c) differs from (1a–b). Before we ask how (5c) differs from (5a–b), consider how (5) differs from (1). Thus,

    6. (a)  The door opened。
       (b)  The thylacine opened the door.

In (6a) the door is the patient of the action. In (6b), the door remains the patient—*the thylacine* has been introduced to make explicit the agent of the event described by opened. Contrast

    7. (a)  The thylacine attacked.
       (b)  The thylacine attacked the wallaby.

Here the thylacine is the agent of (7a) and remains the agent of (7b), where the wallaby has been introduced as patient.

So far so good. But for many unary predicates—and many kinds of events—neither patient nor agent is a good fit for the argument. Thus,

    8. The thylacine became enlightened.

Is the thylacine patient or agent? Becoming enlightened is not something you do in the sense of exercising agency on the world. At the same time we typically don’t think of it as something that simply happens absent some effort on your part, much less as the kind of thing that admits the introduction of an outside agent. We could offer

   9. (a)  The kangaroo enlightened the thylacine.
      (b)  The kangaroo caused the thylacine to become enlightened.

But in (9a), the sense of enlightened has shifted to mean something like informed, perhaps with a sardonic flavor. In (9b), the fact that we had to resort to a periphrastic construction, taking caused for the “matrix” verb and pushing become enlightened into a complement, suggests that this is not the least-marked way becoming enlightened unfolds.

Here it feels more useful to think of the thylacine as the experiencer of become enlightened.

Some verbs admit a valence-mediated alternation between experiencer and patient—an alternation mediated by the number of arguments to the verb. Thus:

  10. (a)  The thylacine awoke.
      (b)  The kangaroo woke the thylacine.
      (c)  The kangaroo caused the thylacine to awaken.

In (10b), in contrast to (9a), it feels reasonable to construe the expression as a description of events in which the kangaroo caused the thylacine to have the experience of becoming awake. In this case, you could make a case there is no distinction between patient and experiencer. In (10c), by contrast, I hear the thylacine as the patient of caused but the experiencer of awaken. In what follows, I’ll take the distinction between patient and experiencer for warranted.