The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) maintains that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unergative, where the grammatical subject is the Agent and the verb describes an activity (laugh, run) and unaccusative, where the grammatical subject is the Theme and the verb describes an achievement, accomplishment or state (open, arrive, exist). Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) argued tha...

We explore the properties of Catalan verbalizing suffix -ej(ar), centering on intransitive verbs. After presenting rich variety outputs that this allows, we focus two generalizations. The first one has to do with consistent eventive nature verbs derived suffix, even from bases count as individual-level predicates, like colour adjectives or proper names. Importantly, their eventivity is orthogon...

1 Current approaches Over the last fteen years, following Perlmutter and Postal's work (1983), there has been constant interest in the problem raised by transitivity alternations. In their work Perlmutter and Postal argued that the single argument of intransitive verbs may either be generated as an object of the verb (unaccusative verbs) or as a subject (unergative verbs) (cf. Bassac, 1997). A ...

Verbs are central to sentence processing, as they encode argument structure (AS) information, i.e., information about the syntax and interpretation of the phrases accompanying them. The behavioral and neural correlates of AS processing have primarily been investigated in sentence-level tasks, requiring both verb processing and verb-argument integration. In the current functional magnetic resona...

1 Introduction One of the central controversies in sentence processing concerns the role of structural factors. The touchstone for the two main competing schools of thought, structure-based and constraint-based, are garden-path sentences, such as The horse raced past the barn fell, discussed in sentence processing literature since at least Bever (1970), and in general the resolution of ambiguit...

Hubble, Ryan M. M.A. Purdue University, December 2013. The ‘X it up’ Verb Construction: A Syntactic and Sociolinguistic Approach. Major Professor: Elena Benedicto. This thesis focuses on a unique and, as of yet, unstudied particle verb construction in English, referred to as the ‘X it up’ construction (e.g. I partied it up last night). Syntactic and sociolinguistic perspectives are taken to exp...

This study used fMRI to inform a debate between two theories concerning the representation of reflexive verbs. Reflexives are verbs that denote an action that the subject applies on herself (e.g., The woman stretched). These verbs are derived by a lexical operation that creates a reflexive from its transitive counterpart. Theories differ with respect to which thematic role is reduced by the lex...

German sentences with man and Italian si impersonale or passivante are often presented as equivalent in contrastive grammars. However, this functional equation proves to be problematic when students refer their own role authors, such in: “Darauf wird aber im folgenden Kapitel eingehen”. Evidently, cannot the speaker role, while same context is well suitable. Starting from interference error, pa...

Theories of aspectual composltlon assume that accomplishments arise when a transitive verb has an incremental theme argument which is realized as a quantized NP-foremost, an NP which is not a mass noun or a bare plural-in direct object position. A problem confronting this assumption is the ]arge number of intransitive, unergative verbs in Getman and English that occur in accomplishment expressi...