In languages like German or Dutch, the distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs is borne out by a number of syntactic tests. Unergative verbs appear in impersonal passives while unaccusative verbs do not (cf. Perlmutter (1978)). Unergative verbs select the perfect auxiliary haben/hebben (to have) while unaccusative verbs select sein/zijn (to be) (cf. Hoekstra (1984)). Unaccusative ...

This study focuses on the neural processing of English sentences containing unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs. We demonstrate common responses in bilateral superior temporal gyri in response to listening to sentences containing unaccusative and transitive verbs compared to unergative verbs; we did not detect any activation that was specific to unaccusatives. Our findings indicate th...

Previous studies have found a processing difference between unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences. They argued that the difference is derived from a syntactic difference, i.e. an unaccusative sentence involves movement whereas an unergative sentence does not. In this study, we are going to show that those studies are uninterpretable due to uncontrolled stimuli and confounds in the mat...

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...

In languages such as French, it is possible to derive from common or proper nouns unergative verbs that intuitively describe ways of behaving, for example, diplomatiser ‘behave like a diplomat’. This paper focuses on the semantics of these verbs, in particular, on the semantic contribution of the incorporated noun, by looking at the entailment patterns between the verb (e.g. diplomatiser ‘behav...

This study presents a novel computational approach to the analysis of unaccusative/unergative distinction in Turkish by employing feed-forward artificial neural networks with a backpropagation algorithm. The findings of the study reveal correspondences between semantic notions and syntactic manifestations of unaccusative/unergative distinction in this language, thus presenting a computational a...

The idea that the verb phrase is a layered constituent has been around in the literature for some time, e. shell theory plays an important role as well. In this paper I will argue that a particular interpretation of shell theory may provide insight into long standing problems such as the nature of syntactic ergativity and the structure of psychological verbs. Let us consider a VP–structure with...

The Unaccusativity Hypothesis (UH) holds that intransitive verbs are divided into two broad classes, namely unaccusatives and unergatives. While there is evidence that the UH holds cross-linguistically, it is known that languages do not divide the intransitives into two uniform groups. We investigate the unaccusative-unergative distinction in Turkish by an offline grammaticality judgment task u...

The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) predicts that the subject of an unaccusative is mentally reactivated in the object position. Previous psycholinguistic studies have reported evidence of reactivation (Friedmann et al 2008, Koring et al 2012). However, these studies did not equate the unaccusative and unergative stimuli, resulting in confounds which jeopardize their conclusions. We reexamined UH ...