Unaccusatives and unergatives: Evidence from Croatian
-
Božana Knežević
and
Irena Brdar
Abstract
We argue that the unaccusativity phenomenon occurs in Croatian, as in many other languages. We demonstrate that unaccusative predicates not only have to meet specific (morpho)syntactic diagnostic criteria, but also that semantic criteria are involved. We show that it is possible to characterize Croatian intransitive verbs as unaccusatives using the following diagnostics: 1. past participle derivation by suffixation of -l; 2. participial adjective formation; 3. -ač (-er) nominals; 4. prefixation by the preverbs po-, do- and u-; 5. the perfective aspect; 6. resultative constructions; and 7. the possessive dative. In order to demonstrate a number of relevant semantic diagnostics, three classes of verbs are isolated, defined in terms of their lexical semantic representation and their morphosyntactic configuration: verbs of change of state, verbs of appearance and verbs of inherently directed motion
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- How nominal compounds are modified by two adjectives
- The interpretation of encapsulating anaphors in Spanish and their functions
- Unaccusatives and unergatives: Evidence from Croatian
- Bipositions and motion events: How verb semantics motivates prepositional vs. postpositional uses of Finnish path adpositions
- The birth of a new resultative construction in Spanish: A corpus-based description
- The acquisition of determiners in child L2 German
- Discourse objectivization, social variation and style of Spanish second-person singular tú
- Comprehension of degree modifiers by pre-school children: What does it mean to be ‘a bit cold’?
- An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian
- BOOK REVIEWS
- MISCELLANEA
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- How nominal compounds are modified by two adjectives
- The interpretation of encapsulating anaphors in Spanish and their functions
- Unaccusatives and unergatives: Evidence from Croatian
- Bipositions and motion events: How verb semantics motivates prepositional vs. postpositional uses of Finnish path adpositions
- The birth of a new resultative construction in Spanish: A corpus-based description
- The acquisition of determiners in child L2 German
- Discourse objectivization, social variation and style of Spanish second-person singular tú
- Comprehension of degree modifiers by pre-school children: What does it mean to be ‘a bit cold’?
- An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian
- BOOK REVIEWS
- MISCELLANEA
