Raffaella Folli and Heidi Harley Consuming Results in Italian & English : Flavours Of

The variable behavior of verbs has always been a fundamental issue for theories of the lexicon/syntax interface. The constructionalist approaches to this problem of the past decade or so have been very successful in accounting for a diverse range of alternations, largely because these approaches have formalized the influence of event structure on argument projection. The theoretical apparatus of this framework has made interesting predictions for previously puzzling grammaticality variations (Tenny 1992, Borer 1996, Davis and Demirdache 1995, Travis 2000, Ritter and Rosen 1998 and van Hout 1996, among others). However, the framework in some ways suffers from overgeneration: having introduced syntactic flexibility with respect to certain classes of alternating verbs, theorists are now faced with the inverse problem of accounting for gaps in alternation patterns. In short, why don't all verbs exhibit all alternation patterns freely? Such limits on variation are the primary success of Lexicalist approaches to argument projection (Jackendoff 1997, Levin & Rappaport-Hovav 1995, among many others). We will treat a particular kind of a restriction on alternations by proposing that it depends on differences in v, rather than on idiosyncratic restrictions on the root V. In particular, we argue that at least one particular kind of gap in alternation can be attributed to the semantic properties of one flavour of v: DO. We will argue that a new typology of v is needed to account for the behavior of consumption verbs, when they take an inanimate subject. These verbs, unlike nonalternating destroy-class verbs, do not generally allow inanimate agents. Compare (1a,c) with (1b,d)