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While "to die" has been classified as an unaccusative verb, like "to fall" and "to arrive", [12] Dąbrowska (2016) [13] noted that "to die" is an example of Unaccusative Mismatch, because "to die" behaves: unaccusatively in some tests, e.g. (!)There laughed a girl in the room (unergative) vs. There appeared a lady on the scene (unaccusative) vs.
An unergative verb is an intransitive verb [1] that is characterized semantically by having a subject argument which is an agent that actively initiates the action expressed by the verb. For example, in English, talk and resign in the sentence "You talk and you resign" are unergative verbs, since they are intransitive (one does not say "you ...
Burzio's generalization recognizes two classes of intransitive verbs: With unaccusative intransitive verbs (e.g., fall), the single argument bears the theme theta role, and the subject is understood as the undergoer or receiver of the action. For example, in the sentence Emily fell, the subject Emily undergoes the action of falling.
For instance, the following example contradicts the definition: * unaccusative: the melted snow, the departed guests, the fallen soldiers * unergative: *the shouted victim, *the slept child, *the hesitated leader In the first case, the only truly unaccusative verb is "fallen"; "melt" and "depart" can both be used transitively — "fall" cannot.
A stative verb has a person or an object that is directly influenced by a verb. An active verb has the direct action performed by the subject. The word order that is most commonly associated with intransitive sentences is subject-verb. However, verb-subject is used if the verb is unaccusative or by discourse pragmatics. [5]
The unaccusative hypothesis was put forward by David Perlmutter in 1987, and describes how two classes of intransitive verbs have two different syntactic structures. These are unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. [25] These classes of verbs are defined by Perlmutter only in syntactic terms. They have the following structures underlyingly:
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The distinction drawn here between ergative and object-deletion verbs is based on the role of the subject. The object of a transitive ergative verb is the subject of the corresponding intransitive ergative verb. With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present.