Earticle

초록

영어

The variable behavior poses a problem for the Unaccusative Hypothesis, which claims that the unergativity or unaccusativity of a verb is determined by the meaning of that verb, since it loses its predictive power if a certain verb can be both unergative and unaccusative. A notable syntactic solution for the variable behavior has been suggested by the linguists like McIntyre (2004) and Mateu (2005). They try to solve this problem by assuming that these verbs’ unaccusativity is syntactically derived from their basic unergativity via a plug-in operation, which they call conflation. Despite its apparent simpler manner of explanation and explanatory power, the plug-in approach to the variable behavior is problematic in that it induces the overgeneration problem. Mateu (2005) tries to solve this problem by filtering out unacceptable sentences by relying on semantic constraints like Wechsler’s (1997) CRR. Pointing out the limitedness of Wechsler’s CRR, this paper proposes another semantic constraint based on the causal relation between the activity denoted by the source unergative verb and the directed motion sense represented by the canonical unaccusative structure.

목차

I. Introduction
 II. Preliminaries
 III. The Plug-in Approach and the Overgeneration Problem
 IV. Causal Relation as a Proper Semantic Constraint
 V. Concluding Remarks
 Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Lee Chang-Su [ 이창수 | Youngdong University ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2026

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810