Mapping Lexical Semantics onto Syntactic Structure: The Problem of Unaccusative Mismatches in Romance Languages

Abstract

The problem of mapping lexical semantics onto syntactic structure became particularly acute with the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) and its claim that intransitive verbs divide into two subsets with distinct syntactic properties. The single argument of unaccusative verbs is an underlying or deep direct object, and thus displays many syntactic properties of direct objects of transitive verbs; in contrast, the single argument of unergative verbs is a subject at all levels of representation, and thus displays the same syntactic behavior as the subject of transitive verbs. This syntactic difference is typically represented configurationally as in(1)(1) Intransitive structures (Burzio 1986) Unergative: NP [yp V] Unaccusative: [vpV NP]