Events, agents and the interpretation of VP-shells*

With this paper, I introduce new evidence in support of the notion of syntactic decomposition of eventive verbs into two separate phrasal projections, one projected (in some sense) by the event itself, and one by the resultant state. The decomposition is essentially that which was argued for in much work in the Generative Semantics tradition, along the lines laid out in, e.g. McCawley (1968), or more recently by von Stechow (1991), or in another sense by Hale and Keyser (1994). Agentivity is a derivative, structurally definable notion, crucially linked to the event projection; if there is no event, there can be no agent. In other words, I argue that a predicate like kill has an underlying syntactic structure containing elements which mean something like CAUSE to die1. In Hale and Keyser's terms, I argue that their 'l-syntax', where certain of the lexical properties of verbs are specified by a syntactic structure, is not in any sense distinct from everyday clausal syntax.