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Many unaccusative verbs alternate with a corresponding transitive verb, where the unaccusative subject appears in direct object position. The ice melted. ≈ The sun melted the ice. The window broke. ≈ The golf ball broke the window. Past participles of unaccusative verb can be used as a nominal modifier with active meaning. This is not ...
Labile verbs can also be called "S=O-ambitransitive" (following R. M. W. Dixon's usage), or "ergative", [6] following Lyons's influential textbook from 1968. [7] However, the term "ergative verb" has also been used for unaccusative verbs, [8] and in most other contexts, it is used for ergative constructions.
With certain intransitive verbs, adding the suffix "-ee" to the verb produces a label for the person performing the action: "John has retired" → "John is a retiree" "John has escaped" → "John is an escapee" However, with a transitive verb, adding "-ee" does not produce a label for the person doing the action.
Burzio's generalization establishes a parallel between unaccusative verbs (referred to as ergative verbs by Burzio [1]) and passives, neither of which assign a subject theta role or accusative case. Burzio describes the intransitive occurrence of ergative verbs in the generalization that bears his name: [ 2 ]
This subject-verb inversion is similar to question formation in English, though in English the inversion may only occur with auxiliary verbs, while in French it may occur with all verbs. If the subject is anything other than an unstressed pronoun, an unstressed subject pronoun that agrees with the subject is added to the right of the verb.
This need not be reflexive, as in "My clothes soaked in detergent overnight.". In English, it is impossible to tell from the morphology whether the verb in Sentence (8) is an active voice unaccusative verb or a middle voice anticausative verb with active morphology. [10]
French verbs have a large number of simple (one-word) forms. These are composed of two distinct parts: the stem (or root, or radix), which indicates which verb it is, and the ending (inflection), which indicates the verb's tense (imperfect, present, future etc.) and mood and its subject's person (I, you, he/she etc.) and number, though many endings can correspond to multiple tense-mood-subject ...
Anticausative verbs are a subset of unaccusative verbs. Although the terms are generally synonymous, some unaccusative verbs are more obviously anticausative, while others ( fall , die , etc.) are not; it depends on whether causation is defined as having to do with an animate volitional agent (does "falling" mean "being accelerated down by ...