Academic literature on the topic 'Unergative verb'

This study argues that in Pazar Laz, an endangered South-Caucasian language spoken in Turkey, all eventive verbal predicates, including both unergatives and unaccusatives, pattern as transitives syntactically, involving a subject and an object position. Thus, there are no syntactic differences between transitives, unergatives, and unaccusatives. The chapter argues that this pattern correlates with the voice system in the language. While it lacks the voice phenomena associated with passives, middles, and anticausatives, Pazar Laz exhibits a three-way voice system involving Initiator (Actor) Voi

Tackling directly the structure of nominalizations, Ahdout and Kastner, in their chapter ‘Bases, transformations, and competition in Hebrew niXYaZ’, examine a set of interactions between syntax, morphological marking, and nominalization in Modern Hebrew, where one kind of morphological marking is associated with a number of distinct morphosyntactic patterns. They report a difference between two main groups of niXYaZ verbs – syntactically active/unergative and syntactically nonactive: unaccusative and passive (. The authors then offer a distinct syntactic representation for each group, and show, on the basis of 415 verbs, that despite sharing morphological marking, the two groups correspond to distinct nominalization patterns: Verbs of the nonactive group, mostly passives, fail to produce a nominalization, while active-unergative verbs nominalize rather freely. Although the difference in structure of niXYaZ active vs. nonactive verbs may potentially account for the gaps in nominalization, they propose that the incongruence of passives with a nominalized form is not syntactic, but rather stems from pragmatic effects, to do with the markedness of niXYaZ when contrasted with the alternant morphologically active form, XaYaZ. The markedness of the niXYaZ forms, according to Ahdout and Kastner, translates to a dispreference of speakers toward using this form, opting instead for the nonmarked form, XaYaZ. Crucially, and unlike passive verbs, the same option is not available for active/unergative verbs in niXYaZ, as they do not substantiate a transitivity alternation with a XaYaZ form. As such, no competition with XaYaZ exists, and nominalization is enabled. Thus, the chapter identifies the involvement of both grammatical factors and extragrammatical factors in the process of nominalization.

The different patterns of the direct (i.e., lexical) causativization exhibited by intransitive verbs are a fundamental topic in the lexical semantics area. The possibilities and restrictions observed in the causativization of intransitives have always triggered divisions in their classification beyond the classical unergative-unaccusative distinction. Spanish is an interesting language in which to explore the limits between possibilities and constraints regarding this phenomenon, given the syntactic variation exhibited by its different dialects. This chapter focuses on variation in the form of contrasts between intransitive predicates that resist lexical causativization in Standard Spanish, such as caer “fall” and entrar “go in,” but allow it in certain Southern Peninsular Spanish dialects such as Andalusian, looking at the relationship between such patterns and other phenomena such as the eventive structure obtained as a consequence of the composition of the verbs under study and other syntactic elements such as reflexive se.

Subject-object asymmetry in wh-subextraction is relevant in many languages, but the degree of subject opacity is not crosslinguistically uniform and can differ within one language. In (Polinsky et al. 2013) two factors are found statistically significant in Russian dependent clauses: the type of verbal structure (unaccusative / unergative / transitive verb) and the position of a subject relatively to a verb (preverbal / postverbal). In this paper we investigate whether the effect of these variables is preserved in Russian monopredicative independent clauses. Using experimental data, we show th