Beating Them There

For a good number of years now, I've lived in LA. The land of never-ending traffic. As a walker/biker, I often find myself walking/biking faster than the cars. Which is actually not that hard, but it's always made me very happy. (Except in the times that I'm one of the suckers in a car.)

Anyway, I remember one of the first times this happened to me, when I first moved to LA. I came home and told my boyfriend at the time about all the cars in traffic and how I walked from one place to another faster than them. I proudly said:

1. I beat them there.

I remember that this is what I said because he laughed and asked how I could be so violent. And the syntactic ambiguity alarm went off and I filed this away for later laughs/analysis.

The analysis is actually not so complicated. And it will end up telling us cool things about the syntax-prosody interface.

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In English, the PP "there" can replace a large variety of different kinds of PPs: those headed by "in"/"at"/"on"/"into"/"onto"/etc. (Though it can't replace all of them: e.g. those headed by "from".) Notably, "there" can replace PP Goals and PP Locations (Wikipedia does a decent job describing "Goal" and "Location"), leading to ambiguity. The "Goal" reading of (1) is "I beat them to that location" and the "Location" reading is "I beat them at that location".

QED. Nothing more to say. Right? Of course not.

Goal PPs are demonstrably lower in syntactic structure than Location PPs. First of all, if you have both kinds of PPs in a single clause, typical word order involves the Goal PP being closer to the verb. So in (2) and (3), "to campus" acts as a Goal PP, and "on a bike" acts as a Location PP:

2. I beat them to campus on a bike.
3. ?? I beat them on a bike to campus.

Secondly, constituency tests show that "beat them to campus" is a constituent to the exclusion of "in a car", (4), and "beat them" cannot be replaced by "do so" when there is a Goal PP, as in (5).

4. I [beat them to campus] on a bike, and John did so in a car.
5. * I [beat them] to campus on a bike, and John did so to the store in a car.

This is evidence that the Goal PP forms a smaller constituent with "beat them", to the exclusion of the Location PP "in a car". Thus the structure for a sentence like (2) is like (6):

6. 

Something like this is argued for in Larson's 1988 paper, "On the double object construction", in Linguistic Inquiry 19. In fact, more articulated structures structures argue, on the basis of more complex evidence, that the structre is more like (7), with the object asymmetrically c-commanding the goal:

7. 

So, back to (1). With the Goal reading, "there" is in a very low structural position (lower than the verb), and with the Location reading, it is rather high in the structure (higher than the verb).

Syntactic analysis of the ambiguity of (1) is now done.

QED. Nothing more to say. Right? Of course not.

The reason I've been thinking about (1) recently is not only that I still frequently encounter this situation, but also because I realized that th sentence can actually be disambiguated with prosody. And moreover, with the appropriate theory of how prosody is influenced by syntax, we have further support for (7).

First, let's establish that there is a phenomenon called "default sentential stress". When all the information in a sentence is new (the speaker assumes the listener(s) don't have any background knowledge, and is not trying to create any implicatures), one word in a sentence will receive extra prominence: sentential stress. I've marked this stress with an acute accent (´) and underlining:

8. A naked man sang me several sóngs.

Note that (9) is a fine sentence, but speaker assumes knowledge on the listener's part (e.g. that a naked man sang someone several songs) or is trying to create an implicature (e.g. that the speaker is the last person you'd expect to have a naked man sing several songs):

9. A naked man sang mé several songs.

A very basic generalization that works rather well is that "the rightmost" word in English sentences bear sentential stress -- this idea goes back at least to Chomsky and Halle's 1968 The Sound Pattern of English. If you want to know more about phrasal stress, see Zubizarreta and Vergnaud's 2006 chapter in The Blackwell Companion to Syntax.

Now notice that the location of the sentential stress is different for the Goal and Location readings of (1)) Namely, the Goal reading structure is pronounced as (10), and the Location reading structure is pronounced as (11).

10. I beat them thére. (Goal)
11. I béat them there. (Location)

How do we derive the distinction? If sentential stress is determined by word order, this is totally mysterious. In fact, the difference between (10) and (11) is structural, as we saw in (7). Actually, despite what I said earlier about "rightmost", many researchers would find the stress location of (11) to be expected -- because there is a generalization going back to Bresnan 1972 that pronominal/anaphoric phrases (such as a pronoun "there") typically avoid sentential stress. That is, maybe a better rule is "assign sentential stress to the rightmost non-pronoun word". However, researchers that employ such a rule would be hard pressed to describe why the pronoun "there" does in fact bear sentential stress in (10).

Sentential stress more complex than word order generalizations could predict.

Notice, however, that the generalization seems to be correct as far as the pronoun "them" is concerned. If we change "them" to a non-pronoun, this non-pronoun will bear the sentential stress in the Location reading. However, we still get a pattern where "there" bears sentential stress in the Goal reading but not in the Location reading:

12. I beat the drivers thére. (Goal)
13. I beat the drívers there. (Location)

So the generalization remains, Location "there" is prosodically different from Goal "there". This is actually predictable, if we assume that prosody is affected -- not by word order -- by syntactic structure. Namely, theories such as those presented in Cinque 1993 (Linguistic Inquiry article) and Zubizarreta 1998 (Linguistic Inquiry monograph) say that the most deeply embedded constituent bears phrasal stress.

This is exactly what our theory in (7) predicts. In the Goal reading, "there" is the most deeply embedded word -- allowing it to bear sentential stress -- and in the Location reading "there" is too high to bear sentential stress.

(In the Location reading "them" would seem to be the most deeply embedded. Maybe the generalization on pronouns doesn't hold for "there" but it does hold for "them". Or, if you want to know about how the generalization about pronouns works out in this framework, I recommend Wagner's 2006 paper in the proceedings of SALT XVI.)

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So. The syntax-phonology interface (namely the sentential stress assignment mechanism) cares about depth of embedding, and not word order. And this depth of embedding difference between Goal and Location PPs is corroborated by both constituency tests and prosodic evidence.

QED.