The Unaccusativity Puzzle: Explorations of the Syntax-Lexicon Interface
Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Martin Everaert
Abstract
The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis, first formulated in 1978, claimed that there are two classes of intransitive verbs: the unaccusative (Jill arrived) and the unergative or agentive (Jill sings). The hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behaviour is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or a combination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines new approaches to the subject and contains several ch ... More
The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis, first formulated in 1978, claimed that there are two classes of intransitive verbs: the unaccusative (Jill arrived) and the unergative or agentive (Jill sings). The hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behaviour is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or a combination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines new approaches to the subject and contains several chapters reproducing papers that have achieved a significant status even though formally unpublished. Among the issues the chapters address are: the determination of the unaccusative class of verbs, the problem of unaccusativity diagnostics, the implications of special morphology for the structural representation of unaccusatives and the status of the external thematic role, the properties guiding the unergative versus unaccusative distinction in acquisition, and the properties of second-language lexicon.
Keywords:
Unaccusative Hypothesis,
intransitive verbs,
unergative,
agentive,
syntactic behaviour,
syntactic context,
unaccusativity diagnostics,
special morphology,
second-language lexicon
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2004 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199257652 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257652.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Artemis Alexiadou, editor
University of Potsdam
Elena Anagnostopoulou, editor
University of Crete
Author Webpage
Martin Everaert, editor
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics
Author Webpage
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