Unaccusative-Causative Alternations and the Dynamic Structure of Verbs

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 theory is developed in Dynamic Event Semantics (DES), Naumann (1998), Naumann/Mori (1998). DES is based on the intuition that non-stative verbs express changes. A change is either an object (event) or a transformation of state (TS). An event e can bring about different results, thus corresponding to a complex TS. Results can be classified according to the way they are evaluated on the execution sequence of e. Each result is related to a participant of e. Verbs with an unaccusative alternant are semantically characterized by determining certain types of results and by imposing identical conditions on these types of results.