The Ling Space's video: How Do Verbs Cause Things Splitting the Verb Phrase

How do verbs like "give" and "put" juggle more than one object? Is there an element that lets verbs cause things to happen? In this week's episode, we talk about splitting up the verb phrase: how our basic syntactic theory has a hard time with verbs with more than one object; how the syntax of causation shows us why we should expand our trees; and how once we break the phrase up, we can capture all sorts of facts, from two-object verbs to ambiguities. This is Topic ! This week's tag language: Kajin M̧ajeļ! Related videos: Happy Little Trees: The Syntax of X' Theory - https://youtu.be/7UOcoQr0hvg Referential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory - https://youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA Up, Up, and Away: The Verb Phrase Initial Subject Hypothesis - https://youtu.be/EJoUyPIdu18 Last episode: Worlds Between Us: The Pragmatics of Presuppositions - https://youtu.be/-iQ7XrehKdw Other of our syntax videos: Raising the Bar: Raising and Control Verbs - https://youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - https://youtu.be/01uH4XfJx3g A Clause for Celebration: A History of Syntactic Clauses - https://youtu.be/980meOhBGR8 Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on how these ideas connect to the passive voice, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-88/ Find us on all the social media worlds: Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace/ And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com/ ! You can also find our store at the website, https://thelingspace.storenvy.com/ We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally. Sources: Much of the basic argument found in the video can be found in this set of slides: https://apps.carleton.edu/people/cussery/assets/7._Introducing_little_v.pdf Examples were taken from Lisa Travis's 2010 book Inner Aspect (http://blogs.mcgill.ca/mcling/files/2012/01/Travis2010InnerAspect_Chpt6.pdf) and this paper by Heidi Harley: http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/mrg.readings/harley_06_On-the-causativ.pdf There's also good stuff in the Wikipedia article on causatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative Some of the original work proposing splitting the VP includes Angelika Kratzer's 1996 paper "Severing the external argument from its verb" in Rooryck & Zaring, eds., "Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109-137". (https://people.ucsc.edu/~mcclosk/Teaching/severing-external-arg.pdf) and Richard Larson's 1988 paper "On the double object construction" in Linguistic Inquiry 19(3), 335-391. Looking forward to next time!