Helga Gese & Claudia Maienborn & Britta Stolterfoht - Ad hoc categorization in context: The case of stative passives

The German stative passive (e.g., Das Fenster ist geschlossen “The window is closed”) has received particular attention in recent semantic theorizing (e.g. Rapp 1998, von Stechow 1998, Kratzer 2000, Maienborn 2005). While some consensus has been reached on analyzing the stative passive as a combination of the copula be plus an adjectivized verbal participle, many issues concerning, e.g., the admissibility of the stative passive and its interpretation still remain open. The aim of our talk is twofold.
   First we will present psycholinguistic evidence for the adjectival analysis of the stative passive. Our studies (acceptability judgment tasks, priming experiments) provide new insights into the admissibility of the stative passive with different verb types. Most notably, our results show that besides transitive resultative verbs (which are uncontroversial in this respect) there is a subgroup of unaccusatives (e.g. verreisen ‘travel’, verschwinden ‘disappear’, abkühlen ‘cool down’) that support the stative passive formation, while unaccusatives like scheitern ‘fail’, platzen ‘burst’, eintreffen ‘arrive’ seem to block stative passives. Finally, the behavior of process verbs is highly context dependent in this respect.Without context stative passive formation is judged as being ill-formed (1a), but with suitable contextual support (1b) acceptability ratings rise considerably.

(1)    a.    ??Das Stofftier ist geknuddelt.
The soft toy is cuddled.

b.    Das Stofftier ist geknuddelt. Jetzt kann Anna einschlafen.
The soft toy is cuddled. Now can Anna fall asleep.

All in all, our findings concerning the admissibility of the stative passive disconfirm standard assumptions in the literature and they provide first evidence to our hypothesis that the stative passive formation is not so much restricted by grammatical conditions but rather conceptually driven.
   In the second part of the talk we will develop the hypothesis that the stative passive formation is a means of building an ad hoc category in the sense of Barsalou (1983ff). The stative passive will be analyzed as assigning to the subject referent an arbitrarily complex property derived from the base verb (plus additional verbal modifiers). Under this view stative passives are more or less spontaneously built property descriptions by which individuals can be categorized wrt. certain goals established within the context. In (2), e.g., a property of being signed by the chancelor is assigned to the letter.

(2)    Der Brief ist vom Kanzler unterschrieben.
    The letter is by-the chancelor signed.

The systematic ambiguity of stative passives (Brandt 1982, Kratzer 2000) will be accounted for by contrasting this ad hoc property assignment either with alternative times at which the letter (still) wasn’t signed (so called post state reading) or with alternative properties of the letter being signed, e.g., by a little employee or not being signed at all, each of which gives rise to different predictions concerning the letter’s relevance and content (so called target state reading). In short, we propose to resolve the stative passive ambiguity by locating the stative passive’s ad hoc property within the property space wrt. contextually salient alternatives. Ad hoc properties will be modelled using Barsalou’s notion of frames.

References

Barsalou, Lawrence (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory & Cognition 11(3): 211-227.

Barsalou, Lawrence (1991). Deriving categories to achieve goals. In G. Bower (ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 27. New York :Academic Press, 1-33.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. (1992). Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. In A. Lehrer & E. F. Brandt, Margareta (1982). Das Zustandspassiv aus kontrastiver Sicht. DaF 19: 28-34.

Kittay (eds.), Frames, fields, and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organization. Hillsdale, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 21-74.

Kratzer, Angelika (2000). Building Statives. In: Berkeley Linguistic Society
26. [http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GI5MmI0M/kratzer.building.statives.pdf]

Maienborn, Claudia (2005). Das Zustandspassiv: Grammatische Einordnung  'Bildungsbeschränkungen' Interpretationsspielraum. To appear in Zeitschrift für germanistischeLinguistik.

Rapp, Irene (1998). Zustand? Passiv?  Überlegungen zum sogenannten
„Zustandspassiv“. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 15, 231-265.

Stechow, Arnim von (1998). German Participles II in Distributed Morphology. Ms. Univ. Tübingen.