Abstract
The argument structure of verbs is pretty uniform across languages. Thus, verbs of `falling’ involve a Theme and an optional Causer and verbs of `working’ an Agent. Aspect is relevant to that uniformity as well since the former verbs will be telic and the latter durative. Stative verbs form a third main class. I first show that, when (spoken/written) languages change, the basic argument structure and aspect don’t change for most unaccusatives and unergatives. There are, however, systematic reports (e.g. Rosen 1984; Keller & Sorace 2003; Randall et al 2004) that certain verbs are unergative in one language and unaccusative in another and that verbs alternate between different aspects (e.g. Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2014). I examine a few verbs diachronically that are ambiguous in the Keller & Sorace work, i.e. verbs of continuation and of controlled motional process, and conclude that a more fine-grained system is helpful.
References
Abraham, Werner 1990. A note on the aspect-syntax interface. In Joan Mascaró en Marina Nespor (eds), Grammar in Progress, 1-12. Foris: Dordrecht.10.1515/9783110867848.1Search in Google Scholar
Allen, Cynthia 1995. Case marking and reanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Benedicto, Elena and Diane Brentari 2004. Where did all the arguments go? Argument-changing properties of Classifiers in ASL. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22.4: 743-810.10.1007/s11049-003-4698-2Search in Google Scholar
Bosworth, Joseph & Northcote Toller 1898. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Brown, Roger 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.10.4159/harvard.9780674732469Search in Google Scholar
Buck, C.D. 1949. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
COCA. The Corpus of Contemporary American English, a 410 million word corpus from between 1990-2010. http://www.americancorpus.org/Search in Google Scholar
COHA. The Corpus of Historical American English, a corpus from between 1800-2010. http://www.americancorpus.org/Search in Google Scholar
Dąbrowska, Anna 2015. The Status of the English Verb TO DIE in Fixed Phrases And Idiomatic Expressions. http://lingbaw2015.webclass.co/schedule/BookOfAbstracts_2015.pdf#page=35Search in Google Scholar
Davies, William 1981. Choctaw Clause Structure. PhD dissertation University of California, San Diego.Search in Google Scholar
DOE. Dictionary of Old English (DOE) texts. http://www.doe.utoronto.ca.Search in Google Scholar
Dowty, David 1991. Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection. Language 67.3: 547-619.10.1353/lan.1991.0021Search in Google Scholar
Fanego, Teresa 2012. Motions Events in English. Folia Linguistica Historica 33: 29-85.Search in Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles 1970. The grammar of hitting and breaking. In Jacobs, Roderick A. & Rosenbaum, Peter S. (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar, 120–133. Waltham, MA: Ginn.Search in Google Scholar
Gelderen, Elly van 2014. Changes in Psych-verbs: A reanalysis of little v. Journal of Catalan Linguistics 13: 99-122.10.5565/rev/catjl.154Search in Google Scholar
Gelderen, Elly van 2018. The Diachrony of Meaning. Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Huber, Judith 2017. Motion and the English Verb. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780190657802.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Keller, Frank & Antonella Sorace 2003. Gradient auxiliary selection and impersonal passivization in German. Journal of Linguistics 39.1: 57-108.10.1017/S0022226702001676Search in Google Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, Dagmar Divjak & Ekatarina Rakhilina 2010. Aquamotion verbs in Slavic and Germanic: A case study in lexical typology. In Victoria Hasko & Renee Perelmutter (eds), New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion, 315-341. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.115.18kopSearch in Google Scholar
Kulikov, Leonid 2009. Valency-changing categories in Indo-Aryan and Indo-European. In Anju Saxena & Åke Viberg (eds), Multilingualism, 75-92. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet.Search in Google Scholar
Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity. Cambridge: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav 2014. Manner and Result: A View from clean. In Rob Pensalfini, Myfany Turpin, and Diana Guillemin (eds), Language Description Informed by Theory, 337-357. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.10.1075/slcs.147.14levSearch in Google Scholar
Lint, Vanja de 2010. Argument Structure in Classifier Constructions in ASL. University of Utrecht thesis.Search in Google Scholar
MED. Middle English Dictionary, online. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/.Search in Google Scholar
OED. Oxford English Dictionary 1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, and OED online.Search in Google Scholar
Narrog, Heiko. 2009. Synchrony and diachrony in transitivity pairs. Association for Linguistic Typology talk, Berkeley, July.Search in Google Scholar
Oomen, Marloes 2017. Psych-verbs in SL of the Netherlands. SL&L 20.1: 55-108.10.1075/sll.20.1.03oomSearch in Google Scholar
Ottosson, Kjartan 2013. The anticausative and related categories in the Old Germanic languages. In Folke Josephson et al. (eds), Diachronic and typological persepctives on verbs, 329-81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.134.12ottSearch in Google Scholar
Page, R.I. 2003. An Introduction to English Runes. London: Methuen.Search in Google Scholar
Perlmutter, David 1978. Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. Proceedings from the 4th Regional Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 157-189.10.3765/bls.v4i0.2198Search in Google Scholar
Randall, Janet, Angeliek van Hout, Jürgen Weissenborn, and Harald Baayen 2004. Acquiring Unaccusativity: A Cross-Linguistic look. In Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Martin Everaert (eds), The Unaccusativity Puzzle: Explorations of the Syntax-Lexicon Interface, 332-353. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257652.003.0013Search in Google Scholar
Rosen, Carol. 1984. The interface between semantic roles and initial grammatical relations. In David Perlmutter and Carol Rosen (eds.), Studies in Relational Grammar 2, 38-77. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Sorace, Antonella 2000. Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs. Language 76.4: 859-890.10.2307/417202Search in Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3, 57–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Tenny, Carol 1987. Grammaticalizing aspect and affectedness. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Search in Google Scholar
Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.10.7591/9781501743726Search in Google Scholar
Zaenen, Annie. 1988 Unaccusative verbs in Dutch and the syntax-semantics interface. Technical Report SSL 123: 317–335.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Elly van Gelderen, published by De Gruyter Open
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Public License.
