Analysing Dutch Present Participle Manner Adverbials

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper is among the first to investigate the internal structure of verb-based manner-adverbial modifiers, which its author is to be commended for. The paper presents its interesting empirical material from Dutch and its dialects reasonably clearly, and is written in good English. All of these things should serve to recommend this paper for publication. However, the paper also has an ‘unbearable lightness’ to it that place its readers in the uncomfortable position of having to grapple with peculiarly sweeping hypotheses and with structures and derivations of considerable complexity without the case for them even beginning to be made by the author. Leaps of faith of the ‘it is plausible to think’ type (without substantiation of the alleged plausibility being offered) need to be made by the reader on multiple occasions, throughout the paper. At no point is any aspect of the analysis genuinely secured into place: the discussion remains at the level of asserted plausibility. I personally find this worrying, but I hasten to add that the paper finds itself in good company in the present state of the art. The field is clearly more tolerant of this trend than I am; and if this means that my judgment is an outlier, I will take it to be no impediment to publication of this paper in Languages. But I would very much like to see at least some revisions implemented before the paper is accepted in its final form. These are detailed below.

 

The paper takes as its point of departure the argument presented in some previous literature that there are manner adverbials (MAs) that are formally PPs (even though no overt P-element appears on the surface), and assumes that ‘this MA ’design’ may be common to all MAs cross-linguistically’. The author calls this ‘the “PP hypothesis”’ (p4, line 98). This is a huge leap, and one for which there really is no obvious conceptual or empirical justification. (The author’s claim that ‘the “PP hypothesis”’ for manner adverbials is based ‘upon closer inspection their constituent parts (such as the -end, -er, and -wijs suffixes’ (p26, line 949) is baseless: none of these suffixes is itself actually treated as an exponent of P; the element ‘a’ in dialectal ‘aluepes’ is treated as a P-exponent, but no strong case for this is presented.) Imagine, by way of comparison, that some paper were to point out that non-dynamic property-denoting expressions are frequently of the category A (which is true), and were to extrapolate from this that *all* such expressions are *invariably* underlyingly APs: such a paper would rightly be rejected for putting the semantic cart before the morphosyntactic horse. Why would things be any different in the case of manner modifiers, which are categorially quite heterogeneous on the surface? I really see no basis for wanting there to be strict categorial homogeneity in the realm of manner adverbials. Doing this by fiat is clearly not okay. There need to be explicit morphosyntactic grounds, in each individual case, for a PP-treatment of manner modifiers. The paper occasionally comes close to providing such grounds; but it ought to do better than this, and certainly should not rely on an extrapolation from some manner adverbials’ PP-status to the categorial status of the entire class of manner adverbials. The presumed uniformity of the class of manner adverbials (p4, line 122) is baseless unless and until a solid argument can be made that ‘manner-hood’ is inextricably linked to ‘PP-hood’.

 

Treating ‘beautifully’ as a PP (a la (6b)) is not an example of ‘decomposition’ (p4, line 122), in the intended sense of what Generative Semantics meant by that term. GS motivated its morphologically abstract decompositional structures based on meticulous empirically based arguments, typically having to do with semantic ambiguity. The author (following Alexeyenko) instead presents (6b) primarily on the basis of a particular categorization of the morphologically concrete element ‘-ly’ (claiming that it is a noun), and then goes on to claim that the nominal constituent formed by AP and ‘-ly’ can only externally distribute as a modifier of a verbal projection if it is included in an abstract PP. But this isn’t a case of GS-style decomposition: no aspect of the semantics of manner modifiers with ‘-ly’ implicates a PP-structure. To say that ‘beautifully’ must be a PP has no discernible semantic benefits: indeed, it is completely unclear what the semantic contribution of the invisible PP-layer would be. For comparison, the following may be helpful: confronted with the co-existence of ‘They consider John a genius’ and ‘They regard John as a genius’, imagine that someone were to claim that predicate nominals are always included in a PP (with this PP sometimes remaining silent): the P-element makes no contribution to meaning, so from a semantic point of view such a hypothesis would be entirely frivolous (and from a morphosyntactic point of view, nothing clearly advocates for a treatment of ‘a genius’ as a PP in ‘They consider him a genius’ either).

 

Treating the ‘-s’ of ‘lopes’ as a derivational suffix denoting manner semantics (p9, line 324) would make this ‘-s’ an outlier among other tokens of this suffix, which are, as far as I am aware, invariably inflectional. The postulation of a head ‘Lex’ (what kind of a category is this supposed to be?) and the attribution of ‘manner semantics’ to the suffix realizing this head are both highly dubious moves. There are plenty of other tokens of ‘-s’ that the author might reasonably draw attention to in connection with ‘lopes’ (incl. ‘loops’ in ‘De hond is loops’; cf. ‘De kat is krols’ and perhaps ‘De vrouw is wulps’; also, ‘Ze stonden tot schreiens bewogen’, from the Christmas traditional ‘De herdertjes lagen bij nachte’). Would it be sensible to generalize over all these cases by saying that ‘-s’ is a derivational suffix denoting manner semantics?

 

The author says about the syntactic derivations given in (19) and (22) that these allow for ‘an easy answer’ (p10, line 358) to the silence of P in the former and the overtness of P in the latter. But as long as the hypothesized movement of nP to Spec,PP remains entirely unmotivated and empirically unverifiable (apart from its alleged connection with P-exponence), the reasoning is circular.

 

The discussion of ‘bijtend’ and ‘lopend’ and their tolerance of the comparative (see (25)) is not presented on a level playing field: what the author is really comparing (with respect to gradability) is ‘speaking bitingly’ and ‘walking’ — not ‘biting’ and ‘walking’. Note that ‘bijtender’ is not specifying a degree of *biting*; so why would ‘lopender’ have to specify degrees of walking? For a proper comparison, we would have to look at degrees of ‘going home walking’ alongside degrees of ‘speaking bitingly’. For ‘going home walking’, one might think that the amount of distance covered on foot could be a degree of this; or the speed at which the walking is done (fast, slow, at a snail’s pace) could be thought to be degrees of going home walking. (I do agree that fast and slow are *speeds* of walking, not degrees proper. But I would like to see the discussion of (25a) v. (25b) be conducted properly.)

 

In what sense is the relation between ‘spelend’ and ‘spelenderwijs’ (p15) ‘much like’ the relation between ‘singing’ and ‘singingly’? This should be made clearer. And also, even if the relation is real, it still will not mean that ‘-ly’ and ‘-erwijs’ are one and the same element. Indeed, morphologically and etymologically ‘-erwijs’ is ‘more like’ English ‘-wise’ (as the author acknowledges below (33)) than like ‘-ly’ (which, in turn, is ‘much like’ Dutch ‘-lijk’).

 

The connection between ‘een dezer dagen’ and ‘een van deze dagen’ (p16) is clear. But is there a clear and simple connection between ‘spelenderwijs’ and ‘bij wijze van spelen’? To me (I am a native speaker of Dutch), the two are not semantically equivalent (though this is a bit tough to judge given that ‘bij wijze van spelen’ is not particularly natural). We can see this more clearly by juxtaposing ‘sprekenderwijs’ and ‘bij wijze van spreken’, which are totally different in meaning. The author appears to be comparing apples and oranges here.

 

Some further details:

 

p2, line 27: The author asserts that ‘zo’ is ‘plausibly’ treated as the lexical core of a(n extended) nominal projection. We never learn about the basis for calling this treatment plausible, nor is it made clear why the author even cares to call ‘zo’ nominal. Since ‘zo’ clearly plays no role in any of the argumentation in the paper, it will not be useful for me to ask the author to elaborate on this; but at the same time, it will not be advisable for the author to make unsubstantiated and hasty claims about this element.

 

p3, line 38: The impression that might emerge from the text here is that past participles *in general* cannot serve as manner modifiers. This would be incorrect, however: some past participles of unaccusative verbs (such as positional ‘gezeten’) can occur as modifiers, as can passive participles (formally indistinguishable from past participles), as in ‘gezegend’ and ‘geslagen’ (in the sense of ‘beaten in a competition’).

 

The discussion starting below (37), about genitive markers, can be cut or relegated to a short footnote. Genitival markers (so called) are always markers of a relationship.

 

On p18, the author again postulates a difference (this time between languages: Dutch and French) regarding the application of movement to Spec,PP. And again, the case for this is left hanging in the air.

 

I missed the point of (44b): ‘bijten’ does not take inanimate DP-complements in the first place (*‘Hij beet appels’), so of course (44b) is ungrammatical.

 

The discussion starting below (48) (‘An open question...’) is again footnote material at best.

 

What the author says about ‘-s’ in dialectal ‘aluepes’ on p25 seems to open the door to an equivalent of ‘aluepes’ in the standard language. Would this be desirable?

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

See attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I am satisfied with the author's handling of the comments on the original manuscript.

Author Response

I thank the reviewer for their time and effort spent for this second review of my (revised) manuscript. I am glad to know they think the manuscript has improved by implementing the previous round of reviews.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

See the attached report.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Generally good, with some occasional slips (as detailed in the report).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf