Event Structure, Unaccusativity, and Locative Inversion

This paper attempts to account for why Chinese locative inversion exhibits crosslinguistically peculiar distributional properties. I argue that the attested crosslinguistic differences are attributed to the differences in the way the socalled “state subevent condition” (Nakajima 2001) is satisfied. Specifically, I claim that it is an operation on the event structure that allows certain nonpassivized transitive verbs to meet the condition. The analysis also receives crosslinguistic support from the Japanese -te aru construction.