Publisher Description

The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis, first formulated in 1978, claimed that there are two classes of intransitive verbs, the unaccusative (Jill arrived) and the unergative or agentive (Jill sings). The hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behaviour is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or acombination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines new approaches to the subject with several papers that have achieved a significant status even though formally unpublished.Among the issues the authors address are: the determination of the unaccusative class of verbs, the problem of unaccusativity diagnostics, the implications of special morphology for the structural representation of unaccusatives and the status of the external thematic role, the properties guiding the unergative versus unaccusative distinction in acquisition, and the properties of second-language lexicon.

Author Biography

Artemis Alexiadou is at University of Potsdam. Elena Anagnostopoulou is at University of Crete. MArtin Everaert is at Utrecht Institute of Linguistics.

Table of Contents

Series editors' prefaceArtemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou and Martin Everaert: Introduction1: Gennaro Chierchia: A Semantics for unaccusatives and its syntactic consequences2: Angeliek van Hout: Unaccusativity as telicity checking3: Hans Bennis: Unergative adjectives and psych-verbs4: Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou: Voice morphology in the causative-inchoative alternation: evidence for a non unified structural analysis of unaccusatives5: David Embick: Unaccusative syntax and verbal alternations6: Tanya Reinhart and Tal Siloni: Against an unaccusative analysis of reflexives7: Markus Steinbach: Unaccusatives and anticausatives in German8: Maaike Schoorlemmer: Syntactic unaccusativity in Russian9: Antonella Sorace: Gradience at the lexicon-syntax interface: evidence from auxiliary selection10: Tonjes Veenstra: Unaccusativity in Saramaccan: the syntax of resultatives11: Hagit Borer: The grammar machine12: Janet Randall, Angeliek van Hout, Juergen Weissenborn and Harald Baayen: Acquiring unaccusativity: a cross-linguistic lookIndex

Review

...a very valuable volume on the topic of unaccusativity. The editors have introduced expertly the volume, the phenomenon, and its analyses. * Werner Abraham Language *

Long Description

The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis, first formulated in 1978, claimed that there are two classes of intransitive verbs, the unaccusative (Jill arrived) and the unergative or agentive (Jill sings). The hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behaviour is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or a
combination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines new approaches to the subject with several papers that have achieved a significant status even though formally unpublished. Among the issues the authors address are: the determination of the unaccusative class of verbs, the
problem of unaccusativity diagnostics, the implications of special morphology for the structural representation of unaccusatives and the status of the external thematic role, the properties guiding the unergative versus unaccusative distinction in acquisition, and the properties of second-language lexicon.

Review Quote

"This is a very valuable volume on the topic of unaccusativity. The editors have introduced expertly the volume, the phenomenon, and its analyses." --Language "Despite the very high standard of the papers, the volume reads easily, is well-organized, coherent, user-friendly and consistent. It is convincingly challenging, high in the quality and interest of each chapter and complete in the sense it addresses all the questions it was designed for."--LinguistList

Feature

classic and new work on a central linguistic issue
brings together distinguished authors from all over the world

Details