On The Unaccusativity Of Existential Verbs

Existentials refer to a type of sentences indicating appearance, disappearance or existence of somebody or something. Within the framework of transformational generative grammar, the study of existentials mainly includes three main problems: (i) the identification of the subject; (ii) the nature of the existential verbs; (iii) the Case of the post-verbal NP. In this thesis, the attention will be attached to the nature of the existential verbs.According to the previous studies, existential verbs are generally assumed to be unaccusatives and many researches are based on this assumption. The identification of the subject and the Case of the post-verbal NP are all associated with the unaccusative verbs which lack the theta role agent in the argument structure and are unable to assign accusative Case to its internal argument.However, there are some unergatives and transitive verbs which challenge the hypothesis of the unaccusativity of existential verbs. There are generally two ways of solving this problem. One way is to reject or revise the current hypothesis. The other way is to provide an alternative account for these unexpected sets.The thesis resorts to the second solution, namely, from the view of syntax and semantics to account for why some transitive verbs and unergative verbs can grammatically occur in this structure. In this thesis, much attention is drawn to prove these unexpected verbs to be derived unaccusative verbs. First, the thesis follows Pan (1996)'s proposal to account for the transitive verbs occurring in existentials. Pan (1996) argues that after a prototypical transitive verb undergoes a process of stativization, its agent is deleted via the lexical rule—Agent-Deleted Operation triggered by zhe morpheme. Likewise, this thesis argues that unergative verbs in existentials are turned into unaccusative verbs by Agent-Thematization Operation in the lexical-semantic representation because of stativization. The derivational conditions are: (i) the verb in question is an agentive manner of motion verb with the argument structure: ; (ii) the movement which the manner of existence verb expresses is a typical one of the entity expressed by the agentive NP in the sentence; (iii) the location is predicated of the theme.Besides, this thesis holds that stativization is the basis on which those transitive and unergative verbs are changed into unaccusatives. Although their derivational lexical rules are different (the former is derived by the agent-deletion operation, and the latter is done by the agent-thematization operation), their derivational levels are the same, both happening in the lexical-semantic representation. Furthermore, this thesis provides some evidence to support the argument that those unexpected verbs are derived unaccusatives in existentials. A further exploration also shows that the existential verb is a special kind of unaccusative verbs, namely, the existential verb is only a subset of unaccusative verbs, and unaccusative verbs entail existential verbs.Thus, the nature of existential verbs can be unified, and the hypothesis of unaccusativity of existential verbs can be confirmed. Furthermore, a uniform interpretation for the related problems of existentials can be obtained.