Effects of Telicity and Agentivity on Floating Numeral Quantifiers as an Unaccusative Diagnostic

Unaccusativity, or split intransitivity, refers to the generalization that intransitive verbs divide into two subclasses, unaccusatives and unergatives. While the core arguments of unaccusatives share common properties with direct objects of transitive verbs, the core arguments of unergatives do so with transitive subjects. The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978; Burzio 1986) accounts for the generalization by proposing two underlying structures for intransitive verbs. The unergative structure involves an external argument base-generated outside of VP (1a) while the unaccusative structure involves an internal argument base-generated inside VP (1b).