abstract Case

being Case-marked is assumed to be a universal property of overt nominal expressions. Whenever there is no visible marking, we assume there to be invisible Case on the given nominal expression.

accusative Case

the case of DPs appearing after verbs, prepositions and visible subjects of infinitival clauses. In English it is visible only on certain pronouns, e.g. him/her.

Burzio’s Generalisation

verbs which assign no theta-role to their subjects do not assign accusative Case to their objects.

Case Filter

every overt DP must be assigned abstract Case.

event structure

verbs can express simple or complex events. Event structure describes what sub-events an event expressed by a certain verb is made up of. This has an effect on the syntactic organisation of elements within the VP. There is supposed to be an isomorphism between event structure and the structure of the VP: a VP breaks up into sub-vPs/VPs in a one-to-one correspondence with the sub-events.

isomorphism

a one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets.

light verb

a verb occupying the head of a vP used in combination with another element, typically a noun or verb, where the light verb’s contribution to the meaning of the whole construction is less than that of a fully thematic main verb, e.g. to take a shower=to shower. Certain verbs expressing aspectual (be, have) or modal (let) meaning also belong here. According to the proposals in the present book the following constituents can appear within the vP in a visible or abstract form (see also vP-shells):

– agentive arguments in the specifier positions

– experiencer arguments in the specifier position

– goal arguments in the double-object construction as specifiers

– the passive -en morpheme in the head of vP

– the aspectual morphemes -en and -ing in the head of vP

– the tense morpheme in the head of vP

object

a DP complement immediately following the verb. It can move to the subject position in passive sentences. See also direct object, indirect object.

subject position

the position where subjects appear in the tree. The base position of the subject depends on its theta role. Agents and experiencers are generated in Spec,vP. Theme subjects appear in Spec,VP. These positions are not Case positions, so the subjects move to the canonical subject position, Spec, IP.

theta role

the semantic role of the participants as required by the predicate. E.g. verbs define what kind of semantic relationship is to be established between the verb itself and the arguments of the verb, and arguments are selected accordingly. The verb kick calls for an agent subject, so its subject position cannot be occupied by e.g. my CD-player.

transitive verb

a verb with a nominal complement, e.g. read, buy. The agentive subject occupies the specifier position of vP, the theme object occupies the specifier position of VP.

unaccusative verb

a verb taking one argument to which it assigns a theme theta-role in the specifier position of a VP. They may also optionally take a location or path argument expressed by a PP. Some of the unaccusative verbs in English are arrive, appear, sit, they are typically verbs of movement or location. Unaccusative verbs can appear in the existential there construction or locative inversion structures. They do not take objects of any kind, see also cognate object.

previous next

Basic English Syntax with Exercises

5.2.3.1 Potential problems

If we accept (45), a number of puzzles arise. First consider the alternation between the transitive and unaccusative uses of ergative verbs. Why does the subject go missing in this alternation and not the object and why does the object become the subject? A possible answer to the latter question is that the unaccusative verb is unable to assign Case and hence the object must move to subject position to satisfy the Case Filter:

(47)

There is a fairly robust generalisation, named after the linguist who first noted it, Luigi Burzio, that verbs which assign no Θ-role to their subjects, do not assign accusative Case to their objects. While Burzio’s Generalisation may offer a description of what is going on in these cases, it is an unfortunate fact that the generalisation has little in the way of explanatory content: why it should be that verbs that have no subjects cannot assign accusative Case is entirely mysterious from this perspective.

A second set of questions concerns the relationship between the transitive alternate and the structure with a light verb and the unaccusative alternate:

(48)aMike made the ball bounce
bMike bounced the ball

How come these structures mean virtually the same thing, especially as, as we have seen, light verbs are not without meaning? Note that the subject of the ergative verb in (48b) is interpreted as the causer of the ball’s bouncing, which is exactly the same interpretation given to the subject of make, a causative verb. The event structure of both examples is also the same:

(49)e = ei → ej: ei = ‘Mike did something’
  ej = ‘the ball bounced’

But while the syntactic structure of (48a) is isomorphic with the event structure in (49), if we analyse the sentence in (48b) as having a structure like (45) then the syntactic isomorphism with the event structure is completely lost.

previous next