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The identification of unaccusative verbs in English is therefore based on other criteria, notably: 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.
In generative linguistics, Burzio's generalization is the observation that a verb can assign a theta role (a title used to describe the relationship between the noun phrase and the predicate, such as agent, theme, and goal) to its subject position if and only if it can assign an accusative case to its object.
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.
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]
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 ...
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.
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:
Some languages treat unergative verbs differently from other intransitives in morphosyntactic terms. For example, in some Romance languages, such verbs use different auxiliaries when in compound tenses. Besides the above, unergative verbs differ from unaccusative verbs in that in some languages, they can occasionally use the passive voice.