Syntactic Analysis Of Unaccusativity In English And Russian

Since Perlmutter(1978) put forth his Unaccusative Hypothesis, there have been voluminous studies on the unaccusative phenomenon in various languages. According to the hypothesis, intransitives fall into two classes: unaccusative verb and unergative verb. Unaccusative predicates select a single internal argument, while unergative predicates select a single external argument. The former argument is in some important sense more like an object than like a subject, although it may end up as subject in the structure. This thesis argues that unaccusativity is a syntactically unified phenomenon, but semantic characteristics of these predicates must also be taken into consideration when necessary. It introduces some theories concerned , such as X-bar theory, theta-theory, case theory and checking theory , and then analyzes unaccusativity in English and Russian respectively. Expletive structure, raising predicate, causative alternation, participle adjective conversion and middle construction can be used to distinguish unaccusative and unergative verbs in English, and so can genitive of negation and distributive po-phase in Russian. Moreover, the thesis manages to track down some similarity on this topic in the two totally different languages. It mentions result structure and locative inversion. The thesis is for the purpose to make a little contribution to the development of the generative grammar.