Studies in Intransitivity

本项目建立在先前nsf支持的“非宾格性”语言现象研究的基础上，该研究涉及到非及物动词分裂为非宾格动词，其表面主语是潜在的宾语。而非否定动词，其表面主语是潜在主语。这项研究现在将解决在这项工作中出现的两个理论问题，这两个问题都涉及动词的适当词汇表示。它们是：(1)意义转换，即动词有规律地表现出几种意思的现象；(2)识别动词的基本参数数量——它的“酸度”。不及物动词也是我们的研究领域。这些探索的结果将进一步加深我们对非宾格性的理解。重点将放在非宾格性“非统一性”这一重要问题的一种表现形式上：如果非宾格性在句法上是有表征的，为什么在无争议的非宾格动词（一个句法上定义的类）之间存在分裂？由于这种分裂反映在行为方面的意义转移和直率，这些问题的调查将带来承担解释非指责性的不一致性。

ABSTRACT This project builds on prior NSF-supported research on the linguistic phenomenon of "unaccusativity", which involves a split among intransitive verbs into the unaccusative verbs, whose surface subject is an underlying object, and the unergative verbs, whose surface subject is an underlying subject. The investigation will now address two theoretical issues that surfaced in this work, both involving the proper lexical representation of verbs. They are: (1) meaning shifts, a phenomenon in which verbs regularly show several meanings, and (2) the identification of the basic number of arguments of a verb--its "acidity". Intransitive verbs are again the research domain. The results of these explorations will further deepen our understanding of unaccusativity. The focus will be on one manifestation of the important question of the "non-uniformity" of unaccusativity: if unaccusativity is syntactically represented, why is there a split among the uncontroversially unaccusative verbs, a syntactically-defined class? Since the split is reflected in behavior with respect to meaning shifts and adicity, the investigation of these issues will be brought to bear on explaining the non-uniformity of unaccusativity.