Some postulates characterizing volitive NPs

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Abstract
D. A. Cruse's ‘Some thoughts on agentivity’ (1973: 11–23) makes the useful distinction of [volitive] and [agentive] NPs. Recognizing this difference is the first step in avoiding some of the difficulties encountered by Jackendoff (1972), Fischer and Marshall (1969) and others in their discussion of how an NP is characterized as [volitive] in a clause and how some predicates can characterize an NP in an embedded clause as [volitive]. These discussions have been relatively inconclusive because of the very common assumption that [ ±volitive] or something like it should be represented as a feature of predicates, or predictable from one. If one believes that lexical selectional features are semantic (as McCawley (1968) argues), one arrives at the kind of ‘referential’ criterion for volitivity that Cruse rightly wishes to shun and that other writers have found so dismaying (see e.g. Jackendoff, 1972: 221). The way to avoid this is to suppose that [volitive] is not a ‘feature’ at all, but rather abbreviates an assumption entailed (or ‘presupposed’) by saying certain things. In this way, some sentences can be marked as contradictory, but many will simply seem queer outside of an explicating context, set of special assumptions, and so on. It follows that a great many sentences starred in recent grammatical literature as inherently bad regardless of context ought not to be. We mark: I asked John to be tall.

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