On dummy reflexive pronouns following unaccusative verbs

Alex Nisnevich

December 20, 2013

1 Introduction

In this paper, I explore perceived acceptability of the dummy reflexive pronoun followingunaccusative verbs. While HW#8 treated all such constructions as unacceptable, manyspeakers find the dummy reflexive acceptable following unaccusative verbs.

For example, consider (1) below:

(1) a. The machinery ground to a halt.b. The machinery ground itself to a halt.

To most speakers, (1)b appears just as acceptable as (1)a. (1)b works so well that italmost seems that grind is acting as an unergative verb here, but the Direct ObjectRestriction asserts that the grammaticality of (1)a means that grind is unaccusative, atleast in (1)a.

How acceptable the dummy reflexive pronoun is varies for di↵erent sentences. Forexample, (2) below appears significantly worse than (1)b, despite syntactic similarities.Thus, there appear to be semantic factors at play.

(2) ??The television exploded itself.

My goal in this paper is twofold: I am interested in the semantic factors that govern theperceived acceptability of the dummy reflexive pronoun following unaccusative verbs, aswell as possible syntactic justifications for why the dummy reflexive pronoun is gram-matical in this position for some speakers.

In order to find out what proportion of speakers judge the unaccusative reflexiveto be acceptable and what semantic factors a↵ect acceptability, I conducted a surveyon Mechanical Turk asking respondents to rate the perceived acceptability of a set ofunaccusative sentences, half of which had a dummy reflexive pronoun and half of whichdid not. In sections 2 and 3 of this paper, I discuss this experiment and its results.

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2 Experiment Setup

I conducted a Mechanical Turk survey with 250 respondents who were paid $0.10–0.25for survey completion. To ensure a U.S.-centric set of responses, most of the survey jobswere geographically restricted to the United States.1

Respondents were given the following prompt:

Rate the grammaticality of sentences

In this survey, you will be given a set of sentences and be asked to rate howgrammatical each sentence is. For the purposes of this survey, a sentence is con-sidered to be grammatical if it would be normal and not unusual to say it in aconversation. There are four sets of sentences, and each set has between 6 and 10sentences. Look at each sentence carefully - some are very similar to others, butall of these sentences are di↵erent.

They were then given four sets of sentences, and asked to rate each sentence in responseto the following question:

Are the following sentences grammatically correct? (That is, would it be normalto use them in a conversation?)

Each sentence could be rated “Yes”, “Probably yes”, “Probably no”, or “No” (I useda four-way distinction in order to allow respondents a greater range of freedom than asimple Yes/No question would, but I avoided adding a middle option in order to forceparticipants to choose between leaning toward “Yes” or leaning toward “No”).

The full list of sentences considered in the survey is included in Figure 1. Eachsentence appeared with and without the dummy reflexive pronoun. In addition, sentenceswere chosen in order to examine several phenomena, including:

• Varying levels of animacy (e.g. The ice cream melted versus The reactor melted)

• The contribution of the resultative (e.g. The gate froze shut versus The gate froze

itself shut)

• The contribution of prepositional adjuncts (e.g. The chair broke itself versus Thechair broke itself under the weight)

1The first batch on 100 tasks was not geographically restricted and paid $0.10 for completion. The

remaining 150 tasks were limited to the U.S. and paid from $0.20 to $0.25.

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Sentences without dummy reflexive Sentences with dummy reflexive

Sentence Yes P. Yes P. No No Sentence Yes P. Yes P. No No

The gate froze. 57.5% 26.7% 11.3% 4.6% The gate froze itself. 9.6% 20.0% 39.6% 30.8%The gate froze shut. 58.3% 22.5% 12.1% 7.1% The gate froze itself shut. 20.8% 20.8% 34.6% 23.8%The television exploded. 80.4% 12.5% 6.7% 0.4% The television exploded itself. 8.8% 14.2% 35.8% 41.3%The chair broke. 81.7% 12.9% 4.2% 1.3% The chair broke itself. 11.3% 12.9% 40.0% 35.8%The chair broke under the weight. 65.4% 15.4% 12.1% 7.1% The chair broke itself under the weight. 15.4% 18.3% 34.2% 32.1%The engine started. 83.5% 14.4% 2.1% 0.0% The engine started itself. 18.9% 22.6% 36.2% 22.2%The light turned on. 81.9% 14.4% 3.7% 0.0% The light turned itself on. 24.7% 21.0% 33.3% 21.0%The computer booted. 56.0% 21.0% 18.5% 4.5% The computer booted itself. 16.5% 19.3% 43.2% 21.0%The computer booted up. 75.7% 16.0% 7.4% 0.8% The computer booted itself up. 27.2% 27.6% 30.5% 14.8%The ice cream melted. 86.8% 12.3% 0.8% 0.0% The ice cream melted itself. 10.7% 11.9% 38.3% 39.1%The reactor melted. 78.6% 14.4% 6.6% 0.4% The reactor melted itself. 13.6% 20.2% 39.1% 27.2%The cancer metastasized. 75.7% 14.0% 9.1% 1.2% The cancer metastasized itself. 17.3% 21.4% 38.3% 23.0%The machinery ground to a halt. 70.4% 17.7% 9.1% 2.9% The machinery ground itself to a halt. 22.6% 28.0% 29.2% 20.2%The sky cleared up. 85.6% 11.5% 2.9% 0.0% The sky cleared itself up. 16.9% 28.4% 35.4% 19.3%The wind calmed. 65.4% 21.0% 9.5% 4.1% The wind calmed itself. 15.2% 28.4% 34.6% 21.8%The winds calmed. 55.6% 21.4% 14.0% 9.1% The winds calmed themselves. 15.2% 22.6% 31.7% 30.5%

Figure 1: Complete survey results. The question asked was Are the following sentences grammatically correct? (That is, would it be

normal to use them in a conversation?), and the four options that respondents had for each sentence were “Yes”, “Probably yes”,“Probably no”, and “No”.

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Sentence % Favorable

The computer booted itself up. 54.8%The machinery ground itself to a halt. 50.6%The light turned itself on. 45.7%The sky cleared itself up. 45.3%The wind calmed itself. 43.6%The gate froze itself shut. 41.6%The engine started itself. 41.5%The cancer metastasized itself. 38.7%The winds calmed themselves. 37.9%The computer booted itself. 35.8%The reactor melted itself. 33.8%The chair broke itself under the weight. 33.7%The gate froze itself. 29.6%The chair broke itself. 24.2%The television exploded itself. 23.0%The ice cream melted itself. 22.6%

Figure 2: Sentences with dummy reflexives ordered by what % of respondents answered“Yes” or “Probably yes” in regards to their grammaticality.

3 Results

3.1 Overall Results

The complete survey results are shown on Figure 1 on the preceding page. However, forthe remainder of this paper, I am interested only in the sentences with dummy reflexives,and I will add the “Yes” and “Probably yes” results together in order to get a roughsense of what % of respondents answered favorably in regards to each sentence. Thesenumbers are compiled in Figure 2 above.

Overall, the % of respondents who found these sentences acceptable ranged from22.6% for The ice cream melted itself to 54.8% for The computer booted itself up, so evenon the most widely accepted sentence, almost half of respondents found it ungrammatical.Unfortunately, I don’t have access to cross-tabulated data, but I would assume thatthere is high overlap between people who find all of these sentences favorable and/orunfavorable.

Given this, the data seems to suggest that about half of the respondents found dummyreflexive pronouns after unaccusative verbs grammatical overall and half found themungrammatical overall. Of course, even for the former group, certain semantic propertiesneed to be satisfied in order for a dummy reflexive pronouns to be acceptable after an

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unaccusative verb.Let’s now take a look at the factors that seem to influence which sentences are deemed

more acceptable than others.

3.2 Animacy

First of all, the top three sentences in Figure 2 all have subjects that are machines ormechanical/electrical devices in some sense (the computer, the machinery, and the light,respectively). The next two sentences have the sky and the wind as subjects. On theother hand, the bottom of the table has subjects like the ice cream, the chair, and the

gate. There appears to be a rough animacy hierarchy:

devices (e.g. machinery, computer)i nature (e.g. sky, wind)i other objects (e.g. chair, gate, ice cream)

That is, barring other factors, dummy reflexives after an unaccusative verb are acceptablewhen the subject is a device more often than if the subject is a natural force, which inturn is acceptable more often than when the subject is something else.

This rule is certainly not without exceptions. For example, The television exploded

itself has television certainly has a device as a subject, but is still the second-worst-rated sentence. What’s going on here? It seems that this sentence is ranked lower than,say, The computer booted itself up because, while booting up is standard behavior for acomputer, exploding is very unexpected behavior coming from a television. Even The

machinery ground to a halt, while describing non-ideal behavior, is still describing anaction that is reasonable given the subject, as opposed to The television exploded itself.Thus, I would expect something like The bomb exploded itself to be rated much higher,though I did not include that sentence in the survey.

3.3 The Role of Adjuncts

Consider (3) below:

(3) a. (24.2%) The chair broke itself.b. (33.7%) The chair broke itself under the weight.

It seems counterintuitive that adding a prepositional adjunct would significantly a↵ecthow grammatical the sentence is perceived to be, but perhaps this phenomenon could beexplained by considering the semantic reasonableness of each sentence.

(3)a is semantically unusual: chairs are low on the animacy hierarchy in 3.2, andso it is strange to say that a chair could break itself. On the other hand, in (3)b, theaddition of the adjunct under the weight clarifies the event that occurred: the chair broke

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as a result of weight piled on it. In this case, it could be argued that the sentence issemantically reasonable: the chair may have collapsed into itself due to the weight, thus“breaking itself”.

In other words, by clarifying the situation at hand, the prepositional adjunct can helpsuggest a reasonable semantic interpretation of the sentence, thus making the sentencemore acceptable than it would be without an adjunct.

3.4 Resultative Secondary Predication Again

As expected from Assignment #8, constructions without the resultative secondary pred-icate tend to be rated much lower than constructions with the resultative secondarypredicate. For example, consider (4) and (5) below.

(4) a. (35.8%) The computer booted itself.b. (54.8%) The computer booted itself up.

(5) a. (29.6%) The gate froze itself.b. (41.6%) The gate froze itself shut.

(4)b and (5)b perform much better than (4)a and (4)b, respectively. This is to be ex-pected, because under our analysis, it is the resultative secondary predicate that licensesthe dummy reflexive pronoun in the first place.

However, this raises the question of why there are relatively highly-rated sentenceswith dummy reflexive pronouns but no resultative secondary predicate. For example,The wind calmed itself has 43.6% acceptance and The engine started itself has 41.5%acceptance. One potentially plausible explanation is that, while calm and start areusually unaccusative, they are behaving as reflexive verbs in this context, and so thereflexive pronoun is licensed by the verb itself.

I am primarily concerned with dummy reflexive pronouns rather than ‘actual’ re-flexives, so in my syntactic analysis below, I will only take a look at constructions withresultative secondary predicates.

4 Syntactic Analysis

The majority of respondents found both of the following sentences to be acceptable:

(6) a. (77.0%) The computer booted up.b. (54.8%) The computer booted itself up.

The analysis that we developed in Assignment #8 only accounts for the grammaticalityof (3)a. My goal now is to come up with a plausible analysis that also accounts for (3)b.

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4.1 The Story So Far

First, let me briefly review my proposed mechanism for the Direct Object Constraint forresultative secondary predication in Assignment #8. I proposed the following:

1. A new functional category Res with a single element:

Res[uTheme⇤, uPred]

2. A new feature Pred that all Adjs and Ps have, as well as Cnf (the complementizerthat triggers non-finite verb phrases).

3. A new element in the v category:

vresult[uRes]

4. A new element in the D category, called the dummy reflexive pronoun:

D[refl, uacc, uRes]

5. A new rule:

The Reflexive Generalization. A reflexive (D[refl]) must be coreferentialwith a c-commanding DP. When two expressions are coreferential, they mustshare the same �-features.

6. An addendum to UTAH:

d. ResP daughter of vresultP ! interpreted as Result

Under my analysis, The computer booted up has the following structure:

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TP

DP

the computer

T0

T[past] vP

v

boot[V,acc] v[uInfl:past]

vresultP

v0result

vresult VP

hbooti hthe computeri

ResP

hthe computeri Res0

Res PP[Pred]

up

Note that, since boot up is an unaccusative verb, it assigns only a Theme, the com-

puter, which moves first to the Spec-ResP position to satisfy Res’s uTheme feature andthen to the spec-TP position to satisfy the EPP.

However, my analysis asserted that constructions such as The computer booted itself

up would be unacceptable, because there is no place for the dummy reflexive D[refl, uacc, uRes]:it can occur only in the Theme position, but the Theme position appears to be occupiedby the television.

4.2 A Second Look

Let’s examine the thematic roles in (6) more closely:

(6) a. The computer booted up.b. The computer booted itself up.

In (6)a, it is clear that the computer is the Theme: it is being booted up by an unseenAgent. The semantic equivalence of the transitive construction in (7)a to the causativeconstruction in (6)b illustrates that the computer is behaving as the Theme in both (7)aand (6)b, and thus also in (6)a:

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(7) a. I booted the computer up.b. I caused the computer to boot up.

However, assuming that (6)b is valid, the computer is clearly behaving as an Agent there.Thus, while boot appears to be unaccusative in (6)a, it appears to be unergative in (6)b.

There are two possible explanations for this behavior: either there are two lexicalentries for boot, one unaccusative and one unergative (and the unergative entry is only inthe lexicon of about half the sampled population), or there is some mechanism by whicha verb that is normally unaccusative can become unergative in this situation.

As an example of the latter, there could be a vagent that selects for a DP but hascomplicated semantic requirements (for example, the DP should have some degree of an-imacy, though what degree is required may vary between speakers). These di↵erences ins-selectional requirements of vagent can explain why di↵erent speakers can have di↵erentgrammaticality judgments when it comes to the dummy reflexive in this situation. (6)bcould then be interpreted something like this:

TP

DP

the computer

T0

T[past] vagentP

hthe computeri v0agent

vagent vP

v

boot[V,acc] v[uInfl:past]

vresultP

v0result

vresult VP

hbooti hitselfi

ResP

D[refl,uacc,uRes]itself

Res0

Res PP[Pred]

up

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In this case the presence of the dummy reflexive pronoun is licensed, because boot

assigns accusative case to it, and Res satisfies its uRes feature. By the Reflexive Gen-eralization, the dummy reflexive pronoun must be coreferential with a c-commandingDP, the only candidate for which is the computer. By sharing its �-features with itscoreferent, the dummy reflexive takes the form itself.

5 Conclusion

In summary, I found that more than 50% of respondents found at least some instanceof a dummy reflexive following an unaccusative verb to be grammatical. Animacy isa major semantic factor governing how many respondents found a given sentence tobe acceptable, though I only have a vague sketch of a possible animacy hierarchy inthis context, and more detailed experiments would be needed to get a better senseof it. Important syntactic factors include the presence of resultatives, and, somewhatsurprisingly, the presence of adjuncts.

Finally, I proposed that the unexpectedly high rates of acceptability for (at leastsome of) these sentences could be explained by unaccusative verbs possibly exhibitingan unergative alternation in certain contexts, conditioned by semantic viability.

An alternative explanation could be that some speakers have a secondary unergativelexical entry for certain unaccusative verbs, though this explanation is somewhat un-satisfactory because the subject seems to be at least as important than the verb, if notmore, in determining acceptability, as shown in (8) below.

(8) a. (22.6%) The ice cream melted itself.b. (33.8%) The reactor melted itself.

There are still more directions to look at in this topic. In particular, consider (9) below:

(9) a. (97.9%) The engine started.b. (41.5%) The engine started itself.

As discussed in 3.4, while start behaves as an unaccusative verb in (9)a, it behaves as areflexive verb in (9)b. This is a phenomenon that was outside of the scope of this paper,but it would be interesting to see how the unaccusative/reflexive alternation fits in withthe unaccusative/unergative alternation that I discussed above, as well as whether thereare unaccusative verbs that can exhibit both alternations with high rates of acceptance.

On a more general note, I found it interesting and enlightening to deal with phe-nomena that vary so much between English speakers. In a field that generally strivestoward a grammar that explains all possible constructions in a single framework, it’s cer-tainly a compelling change of pace to deal with grammatical properties that are highlyspeaker-dependent and work with probabilities rather than hard-and-fast rules.