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Why are only two classes of unergative verbs different from all the others?

Any account of the resultative construction must provide some explanation of the distinct behaviour of the verbs of manner of motion and the verbs of sound emission in what appears to be the unaccusative resultative construction, to the exclusion of all other unergative verbs.

Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) are forced to assume a lexical rule which applies only to these verb classes, without any explanation for why the lexical rule is only relevant for these particular classes. Their approach therefore does not satisfy this criterion.

Wechsler (wechsler:96) does not directly address the behaviour of verbs of manner of motion and verbs of sound emission, but relies on the mechanisms of his theory to capture the facts. In particular, each verb of manner of motion and verb of sound emission could be associated with a lexical entry in which a locative canonical result for the event is encoded in the background:telos feature, and in which the located entity is structure-shared with the subject of the sentence (i.e. the entity undergoing motion or the entity emitting sound, respectively). The structure-sharing is accounted for in Wechsler's analysis by a constraint for English which requires a resultative to be predicated of the AFFECTED THEME -- the argument which undergoes a change of state or location in consequence of the event described by the main verb. This constraint ensures that the resultative phrase is predicated of the subject of the verbs of manner of motion, the verbs of sound emission, and the unaccusative verbs and the object of other transitive verbs, without reference to any syntactic properties of the sentence (in contrast to Levin and Rappaport Hovav's DOR in DOR). Thus the answer to the question posed in this section heading on Wechsler's account is simply that these verbs are control resultatives whose affected theme corresponds to subject position. This explanation of course hinges on the control/raising distinction Wechsler draws and the association of a canonical end result with the verbs of manner of motion and verbs of sound emission. It is, however, far from clear whether the latter assumption is valid (see Section 4.4.2), so while the account implicitly meets this criterion, it may do so on the basis of problematic analyses.

By identifying four different constructions and explicitly defining the thematic relations expressed in each one, Goldberg (1995) does not have to isolate verbs of manner of motion from other unergative verbs. The definitions of the constructions are simply such that verbs other than the manner of motion verbs are thematically compatible only with the Intransitive motion construction since the construction requires the verbs to be an instance or means of MOVE-ing. She does not, however, address verbs of sound emission, which would require some additional mechanism such as a lexical rule controlling a sense shift of these verbs, as these verbs are not compatible with the MOVE predicate.


next up previous contents
Next: Semantics of the constructions Up: Criteria which the solution Previous: What licenses the constructions?