5.2.3.1 Potential problems

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.