According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, unaccusative subjects are base-generated in object position and move to subject position. We examined this hypothesis using the cross-modal lexical priming technique, which tests whether and when an antecedent is reactivated during the online processing of a sentence. We compared sentences containing unergative verbs with sentences containing unaccusati...

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...

SV sentences with unaccusative verbs like The leaf fell involve movement from object to subject position. This line of studies tested whether young children can produce this movement and whether they represent SV sentences with unaccusatives as derived by movement. In Hebrew, unaccusatives appear in both SV and VS orders. This optionality allows for the testing of the acquisition of object-to-s...

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...

Abstract This paper presents a unified outlook on the syntax of constructions featuring reflexive clitic se , with particular emphasis uniform morphosyntax Hungarian element -ik treated as an exponent both in verbal domain and nominal (in ordinal numeral constructions). The analysis is couched predication proposed Den Dikken (2006) represented subject reverse predication.

In the realm of causativization, the traditional tension between explaining crosslinguistic variation while maintaining that a phenomenon has a common universal source can be stated specifically as follows: how can we explain the fact that if a certain type of verb causativizes in both languages A and B, the derived predicate usually has the same syntactic and semantic properties, while also ac...

This paper suggests that the theory of A-chain maturation can account for an asymmetry in the development of “full” unaccusatives and passives in Japanese. We show that the early success with full unaccusatives is due to the availability of unergative misanalysis. The nominative case marker drop phenomenon and the syntactic analysis of the full unaccusative also support this hypothesis. We clai...

We propose a unified syntactic-semantic account of passive sentences and sentences with an unspecified object (John read). For both constructions, we employ option types for introducing implicit arguments into the syntactic-semantic categorial mechanism. We show the advantages of this approach over previous proposals in the domains of scope and unaccusatives. Unlike pure syntactic treatments, o...

Unaccusativity, or split intransitivity, refers to the generalization that intransitive verbs divide into two subclasses, unaccusatives and unergatives. While the core arguments of unaccusatives share common properties with direct objects of transitive verbs, the core arguments of unergatives do so with transitive subjects. The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978; Burzio 1986) accounts for...

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...