Fabienne Martin

Fabienne Martin is an Assistant Professor of French Linguistics at Utrecht University, specializing in semantics and its interfaces  as well as language acquisition. She investigates phenomena such as causation, agentivity, aspect and (low)  modality   across languages, particularly in Romance and Germanic languages.  Her work addresses for instance the differences between synthetic vs. analytical causatives, the expression of typical vs. atypical agency,  the influence of the external argument on the interpretation of the verbal phrase or the semantics and pragmatics of reflexive construals.

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Photo credit: Natasha Korotkova

Interview

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OASIS: Thanks for talking with us. What's your favorite ontological entity and why?

FM: I think it's states that depend on actions. For instance, if someone was nice when I talked with them, they were in a state of niceness during our conversation, but perhaps they are in fact not nice at all as a person, and this state they manifest can’t easily be seen as an instantiation of something more general, like usually the case with dispositions. The same with abilities: it can happen to each of us to be able once to do something while we wouldn’t say we have the ability to do this thing.    This ontological dependence that characterizes these fluctuant states is very interesting - they seem to exist only through an action. This is not typical of states, and because of this, these predicates have a lot of interesting aspectual and other semantic properties across languages.

OASIS: What is everyone wrong about?

FM: A lot of linguists still think that agents need to be animate. It's easier to admit machines as agents, and maybe teleologically capable entities in the sense of Folli and Harley, like teakettles, which maybe are similar to machines.  But even inanimates that are absolutely not instruments sometimes need to be treated as agents in the grammar. As Folli and Harley note, unergative verbs that require an agentive subject are sometimes compatible with non-instrumental inanimate subjects, so you need  to admit that in the grammar there is something like inanimate agents, and not only flowers, but also stones, or pieces of wood.  This is something that I really have to struggle with a lot in talks because people keep laughing when I say that you have problems if you assume that agents are always animate. But I will convince them!

OASIS: What is your favorite fact about a language other than English?

FM: It's a thing about Mandarin Chinese, you can detransitivize or at least use intransitively agentive verbs like eat. A famous example is The chicken ate, that can either mean to say that the chicken was eating but also that the chicken was eaten. I worked on these sentences with Hongyuan Sun and Hamida Dermidache and we call them "anti-agentives" as opposed to "anti-causatives" because the piece that is demoted is not a cause but rather an agent. Anti-agentive construals  are fascinating, because it’s often admitted that when a verb presupposes an agent, it has to be expressed, so Mandarin Chinese and apparently quite a few other languages prove this wrong.

OASIS: Tell us about a student you've learned something from.

FM: I would like to mention Zi Huang. I  met her when she was in Berlin for some time and she was working  on nominalizations and the linguistic expression of facts.  I discovered while writing on facts  an interesting handout from her. Before reading it, I was assuming that the difference between direct vs. indirect causation  can’t really characterize causation between facts, because facts being in a sense eternal and not located in time and space,  you can’t really say about two facts that  they are more or less temporally distant from each other, as you do with events. But in this hand-out she shows that, contrary to what I thought, facts can in fact be anchored in time - you can have temporal anchoring in a place where I didn't think you could have it. Which, in turn, means that it’s maybe not true after all that the direct vs. indirect distinction can’t apply at all to causation between facts.

OASIS: What's the most recent "aha" moment you have had?

FM: It's not the most recent one, but maybe the strongest one. It was at CHRONOS in Pisa, and there was a talk by Karoly Varasdi about the progressive, so he was telling us about indicative conditions and so on and I was so excited that I could barely stay seated.  I thought this is exactly what I need to characterize agentive causations, as opposed to non-agentive causations. I thought, I now need to rush and read this paper and write! But my daughter was still 1 year old so I wasn't able to do that so quickly! But I did write this paper and some years later, Karoly and his wife Zsofia Gyarmathy and I gave a course in Paris together, so it was a very inspiring work and a very inspiring collaboration.

OASIS: Who are your professional heroes? 

FM: I have to think about all these people who did tremendous work but ended up leaving academia because they couldn't stand it anymore or could not find a job. I think about them often because I think about the exciting  papers they will never write. Karoly is one of them, Zsofia  as well, and there are many others, like Tillmann Pross or Galit Sassoon.  So they are my heroes. I also sometimes think, perhaps I’m wrong, that people tend to cite less those who left the field because they can’t reciprocate, which I find very sad and unfair, so I hope I’m wrong!

OASIS: How old were you when you discovered linguistics? What made you interested in it?

FM: When I was about 8, my mother blamed me for claiming that quelque can be used in the singular form  in French, and I got very upset because I was sure that you could use it. It's actually a little old fashioned, but she was strict that I was making a mistake. A similar thing happened in an English class - I used emphatic do before a verb and I lost a point on a test because the teacher couldn't imagine that I would use this emphatic do, and probably thought it was an example of spurious do, which exists in L2 English! In fact, I ended up working on spurious do and its relation to emphatic do,  and I have a paper coming up in Glossa about it. So this is my revenge on this teacher! Maybe this is how I started thinking as a linguist, to get really upset at people trying to shrink your possibilities in language use, and thinking that because you are in primary school, you can’t be aware of emphatic do as an L2 speaker. 

OASIS: Tell us how your career turned out in an unexpected way. 

FM: I was supposed to prepare a PhD in metrics - metrics of Emile Verhaeren, who is a Belgian poet. In the end the professor did not get the grant that would have supported it, but  that was the career that was originally planned for me. Years later, maybe I made a mistake, when I had to choose the topic of my dissertation. I did first a licence in Romance philology, but then there was a new track in linguistics and I went back to study, and at some point I had to choose between different topics for a PhD project. I considered asking Didier Demolin to prepare a PhD project on the different prosodic realizations of oui and non in French, so something at the interface between prosody,  semantics and pragmatics, but in the end I didn't do that - that would have been so much fun to write that dissertation!

OASIS: Thanks for answering our questions. See you in Edinburgh! 

FM: You're very welcome. Yes, see you there!