The Relation between Lexical Structures and Syntactic Structures

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The main purpose of the present research was to explore the relation between lexical structures and syntactic structures within the framework of generative grammar. In pursuing the research, I focused upon the phenomena which I refer to as the 'unaccusativity alternation.' 'Since Perlmutter (1978) proposed the Unaccusative Hypothesis, the notion of unaccusativity has been of great importance in the study of verb syntax. The Unaccusative Hypothesis is a generalization on underlying properties of verbs to the effect that intransitive verbs, which were assumed to be uniform in their basic syntactic properties, can be subdivided into two categories: unergative verbs and unaccusative verbs. According to this hypothesis, the sole argument of an unaccusative verb (e.g. freeze, break, etc.) is a structural object at D-structure, although the argument of unergative verb (e.g. run. laugh, etc.) occupies the subject position.Levin and Rappaport Hovav have found in their studies of unaccusativity … More that verbs of manner of motion (e.g. run, jump., etc.), which usually have unergative properties, behave as if they are unaccusative when they are accompanied by phrases of 'change of location.' For instance, the verb run behaves as an unergative verb when it appears in the sentence The children were running in the garden, but it shows typical unaccusative properties in the expression The children ran into the room.I have attempted to explain this type of alternation, utilizing the 'zero morpheme' analysis of verbs developed in Pesetsky (1995). As a starting point of the research, I took notice of the Japanese construction which corresponds to an unaccusative alternation construction in English. In Japanese, verbs of manner of motion always form a bimorphemic structure when they are used as unaccusative verbs; the morpheme - teiku must be attached to the verb stem (e.g. hashir), as in Taro wa eki ni hashi(t)-teitta. My proposal is that English has a zero counterpart of Japanese -teiku in the lexicon, and manner-of-motion verbs are always bimorphemic in their unaccusative use in the sense that they always consist of a verbal stem and a certain kind of zero morpheme. I have shown that the bimorphemic analysis proposed in this research has desirable consequences in explaining some peculiar properties of unaccusative alternation. Less