A Research Into The Unaccusativity Of Intransitive Verbs

Since the advent of the Unaccusative Hypothesis in 1978 by Perlmutter, unaccusativity phenomenon has aroused great interest among linguistic researchers. Numerous researches have been done in various languages and the research interest has been focused on the Case of unaccusative verbs and unaccusative diagnostics.This thesis makes a thorough research into unaccusativity phenomenon. It analyzes the validity of each approach to unaccusativity and points out the inadequacy and problems of the current researches.This thesis first gives a brief introduction to the theoretical background and its related theoretical issues, such as the Case of unaccusative verbs. Then, we analyze the two approaches to unaccusativity, namely, the syntax-based approach and the semantics-based approach. The former emphasizes the syntactic configurations of the arguments, ignoring the distinction between syntax and lexical semantics; the latter places its emphasis on semantic features, such as agentivity and telicity of the verbs. Finally, the debated issues in the unaccusativity literature are presented and discussed, and Levin and Rappaport-Hovav's (1995) approach to agentive verbs of manner of motion is re-examined in particular.It is suggested in this thesis that there remain some deficiencies with both approaches to unaccusativity and further research is required. The syntax-based approach fails to explain the distribution of unaccusative verbs in Resultative Construction; the semantics-based approach is not likely to generalize the regularities and parametric differences of certain verbs in auxiliary selection both within and across languages.In addition, Levin and Rappaport-Hovav's (1995) analysis of agentive verbs of manner of motion is empirically questionable. Their explanation of the difference in three syntactic structures between roll-type and swim-type verbs is in contradiction with linguistic facts. It is pointed out their distribution in those structures may have something to do with the semantic selectional restrictions on this kind of verbs, but more linguistic facts remain to be observed in a more systematic study.