4. DESCRIPCIÓN DE LOS MÉTODOS ANALÍTICOS Y
4.2. MÉTODOS ANALÍTICOS Y ESTADÍSTICOS PARA LA
4.2.1 Guía para la evaluación del Riesgo en Prospectos Petroleros.
The fact that MC made large numbers of function word substitution errors on those verbs with an unaccusative reading, and absolutely no such errors on the other verb classes, means that these results are clearly highly significant. (To confirm this, a chi- square statistical analysis was carried out comparing the numbers of function word substitution errors made on the unaccusatives and on other verbs: = 47.779, df = 1; p< 0.001. As expected, this is a highly significant result.) This suggests that MC can, at some level, identify and react to unaccusativity, but generating the structure associated with the syntactic reflex of unaccusativity is problematic for him, and sometimes leads to his misidentification of an unaccusative verb as a functional category.
Table 2 below shows all the function word substitution errors made by M C on reading of the unaccusative verbs. It can be seen that there is, as usual, a predominance of M C ’s ‘favourite’ function words as responses, with because appearing 7 times (17.94%), before 11 times (28.21%), and and after 4 times each (10.26% each), and the remainder (33.33%) being prepositions {for, at, on), with two instances of the adverb
forw ard and one each of the auxiliary can and the wh word how. No particular response is significant-
Target
Target type*
Response
Response type
begin A because conjunction
begin A and, before conjunction
begin A because conjunbtion
begin A before conjunction
come A before conjunction
come A before conjunction
continue A for, towards preposition
continue A after preposition
enter A forward adverb
gather A before, after conjunction
go A for preposition
go A before conjunction
increase A forward adverb
know A for, I know it very well preposition
know A how wh
know A after preposition
recover A because conjunction
recover A because conjunction
return A after preposition
return A for preposition
settle A at preposition
spread A on, in preposition
survive A before, because, after conjunction
survive A after preposition
arrive U before, after conjunction
ensue U and preposition
exist U before conjunction
linger U before conjunction
live U is, can’t do it, can? auxiliary
occur
u
at, on prepositionoccur
u
on prepositionremain
u
and conjunctionremain
u
because conjunctionremain
u
and, forward conjunctionremain
u
for prepositionremain
u
before conjunctionrise
u
because conjunctionrise
u
because conjunctionthrive
u
before conjunctionlist. Full data are provided in Appendix XL *A = ambiguous unaccusative / transitive verb; U = unambiguously unaccusative verb.
-ly predominant, and there is no readily apparent pattern of responding - for instance, MC does not appear to use visual cues, or semantic information, to help him decide which functional category he will produce when responding. (Reading know as ‘h o w \ for instance, could have been interpreted as a semantic error of sorts; but this interpretation of that particular response seems highly unlikely, given M C ’s variability across occasions of reading and across stimuli.) Most of the target words do not appear to have met with the same response on different occasions; though begin ‘because’, come ‘before’, recover ‘because’ and rise ‘because’ all occurred twice; but though come and rise were identified correctly on the other three occasions of reading, MC made one inflectional error, one visual error and only one correct response when reading recover, and two other function word substitutions plus a derivational error when reading begin. The verb remain elicited five different functional category substitutions.
In other words, these data are not particularly amenable to a straightforward error analysis. Patterns within the data are not apparent. It seems that an explanation in terms of a less than total deficit, which yields an inconsistent pattern of responses, is the most plausible line of attack - especially in view of the fact that, when no transitive alternation is available, MC is still able to read unambiguously unaccusative verbs correctly around 70% of the time. W hat could be causing these function word substitution errors?
W e have seen that MC makes this kind of error only on other function words; he does not substitute function words for substantives (see chapter 2, section 2.5.1). His anomalous, and statistically significant, production of function word errors in response to written unaccusative verbs suggests, in accordance with my account of his deficit as underlyingly morphological in nature, that unaccusative syntax involves the immediate requirement for some projection of a functional category. Is this a possibility?
Functional categories in English are often not overtly realised, yet on current assumptions, there would be nothing to prevent MC from making recognition errors on reading such covert functional categories (as well as those which are overtly realised). However, it is clear that such functional items cannot be presented to MC for a single words reading task; so a test of this hypothesis is difficult to devise, unless items can be
identified which are obligatorily associated with such covert functional morphemes. Note, however, that MC does not make function word substitution errors when he is reading inflected substantives; his errors on such items are errors of affixation (stems tend to be correctly produced). Yet an inflected verb is presumably obligatorily associated with the functional categories Tense, AGR and (possibly) Aspect; a pluralized noun is similarly presumably obligatorily associated with the functional category Num(ber). Nouns are also Case-marked, though such marking is usually null in English (except on pronouns, which are functional categories in their own right); but MC does not misidentify inflected nouns or verbs as function words.
So, if MC only makes function word errors when a functional category is presented to him for reading, and if these errors do not extend to cases where a functional category is merely affixed to a substantive, then the presence o f function word errors on reading of unaccusative verbs is truly puzzling. There must be some functional realisation of such verbs which is not overtly morphologically marked, and which does not simply involve affixation of a phonetically null functional morpheme to a substantive verb. One possibility may be that unaccusatives are adjoined to a functional head. This would effectively mean that unaccusatives are realised as functional by the time they enter the syntactic derivation (on the assumption that the morphological component is pre-syntactic). But what could be the purpose of such adjunction? And, if adjunction is available as a morphological operation, why should such errors be limited to unaccusative verbs in M C ’s reading? We would expect to see them on any substantive which can undergo morphological adjunction to a functional category. In what follows, I attempt to account for this pattern of performance, and to provide a coherent and parsimonious account of unaccusatives as adjoined to functional heads, returning later (3.4.2) to the problem of M C’s ability to correctly identify many unambiguously unaccusative verbs .