On the empirical foundations of the detransitivisation analysis of unaccusatives

Pethő, G., Kardos, É.: On the empirical foundations of the detransitivisation analysis of unaccusatives.
Argumentum (Debr.). 10, 486-518, 2014.

DEA

title:

authors:

Pethő Gergely
Kardos Éva

published:

2014

type:

article

genre:

foreign language journal publication in domestic (Hungarian) journal

journal:

Argumentum (ISSN: 1787-3606)

language:

English

HAC:

Humanities, Linguistics

subjects:

causative-unaccusative alternation, selectional restrictions, derivational morphology

abstract:

This paper contributes to the discussion on causative-unaccusative verb pairs in English and Hungarian. It examines numerous assumptions in derivational detransitivisation analyses of such verbs and shows that these assumptions are empirically inadequate. A non-derivational analysis is proposed as an alternative, which seems to be void of the problems that derivational analyses suffer from.