Theoretical approaches to unaccusativity have placed an emphasis on their derivation from underlyingly transitive predicates, which is assumed to involve argument reduction, possibly triggered by pre-syntactic affixation of some abstract morpheme. This paper presents some data from an aphasic subject who demonstrates a robust effect of grammatical class; he is unable to read any function words,...

The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) maintains that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unergative, where the grammatical subject is the Agent and the verb describes an activity (laugh, run) and unaccusative, where the grammatical subject is the Theme and the verb describes an achievement, accomplishment or state (open, arrive, exist). Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) argued tha...

Many transitive verbs have a so-called unaccusative alternant. The existence of such alternants raises the question of how the class of verbs that exhibit this alternation can semantically be characterized. In this paper a theory is presented in which the existence of unaccusative alternants is derived from basic semantic properties that are used for an aspectual interpretation of verbs. The th...

Within the debate about heterogeneity of unaccusative structures, aim this paper is to distinguish two types Spanish marked anticausative inherent reciprocals (AIRs) from other syntactic (SRs) with se. Several diagnostics show that AIRs such as mezclarse ‘get mixed’ are symmetric, unaccusative, telic, and causative alternations, while SRs transitive vary in their aspectual properties do not alt...

Previous studies have demonstrated that, for adults, differences between unaccusative verbs (e.g. fall) and unergative verbs (e.g. dance) lead to a difference in processing. However, so far we don’t know whether this effect shows up in children’s processing of these verbs as well. This study measures children’s processing of intransitive verbs using the Visual World Paradigm. We find that child...

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...

This paper addresses the issue of Split Intransitivity (si) and Unaccusative Mismatches (uMs), proposing a constraint-based approach to si and ums within a recent framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. I argue against the widely accepted dichotomous distinction of intransitive verbs, which has been advanced by the Unaccusative Hypothesis [Perlmutter (1978)]. I then propose a quadrip...