A Study of Inanimate Unergatives

............................................................................................................................... 1 1 Introducing inanimate unergatives ...................................................................................... 2 1.1 The domain of intransitive verbs ..................................................................................... 2 1.2 The domain of inanimate unergatives .......................................................................... 4 1.3 The mapping problem .................................................................................................. 8 1.4 The transitive alternate problem ................................................................................... 9 2 Theoretical Framework .................................................................................................... 11 2.1 -system: semantic vocabulary .................................................................................. 12 2.2 -system: operations on -grid ................................................................................... 14 2.3 -system: mapping procedures................................................................................... 16 3 The mapping problem ...................................................................................................... 19 3.1 Previous accounts ...................................................................................................... 20 3.1.1 Inanimate unergatives are internally caused (L&R 1995) .................................... 20 3.1.2 Inanimate unergatives are base-generated as intransitives, unaccusatives are derived (Reinhart 2002) ............................................................................................... 22 3.2 Main hypothesis: the subject of inanimate unergatives is an inanimate cause [+c –m] 24 3.2.1 The main hypothesis ........................................................................................... 24 3.2.2 The “Caused-NP” experiment ............................................................................. 27 3.2.3 Method and procedures ....................................................................................... 29 3.2.4 Results ................................................................................................................ 30 3.2.5 Discussion .......................................................................................................... 31 3.3 Accounting for the mapping problem ......................................................................... 32 4 The transitive alternate problem ....................................................................................... 34 4.1 Previous accounts ...................................................................................................... 36 4.1.1 Unrelated, underived verb meanings (L&R 1995) ............................................... 36 4.1.2 The transitive alternate is formed by causativization (Reinhart 2002) .................. 36 4.2 The solution of the transitive alternate problem: the Agent-Instrument pattern ........... 40 4.3 Inanimate unergatives in English ............................................................................... 46 4.4 Causativization vs. Agent-Instrument alternations ..................................................... 50 5 Summary.......................................................................................................................... 57 Appendix A: The Causal Implication Questionnaire ("Caused-NP" test) ............................. 60 A.1 The questionnaire: (originally in Hebrew) ................................................................. 60 A.2 Results ...................................................................................................................... 63 Appendix B: cross linguistic evidence (Russian) ................................................................. 65 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 67