ON DEVIANT CASE-MARKING IN LATIN^355
ment. Activity verbs like utor ("I use") assign one macrorole, an actor,
which is linked to the agent or effector argument, in accordance with the A/
U hierarchy. Such verbs are thus intransitive. Activity verbs, by definition,
assign no undergoer macrorole since, as they express inherently unbounded
states of affairs and therefore cannot in principle have a patient argument,
which is the prototypical undergoer (see "Synopsis", sect. 3.3.2). Thus,
such verbs should be expected to lack an accusative object; their lack of
transitivity is not lexically idiosyncratic, but characteristic of their class. It is
for this reason that the lexical representations of two-place activity predi
cates do not bear the feature [+MR]; given the Aktionsart class of these
predicates, one can predict that they license a single macrorole.
The instances that do require explication are those in which an
accomplishment predicate like edo, "I eat," which can also serve as an
activity verb (e.g., as when coupled with an object designating an
unbounded quantity: pisces (A) edit per totam noctem "he ate fish all night"
but pisces (A) edit in decern diebus "he ate fish in ten days"), assigns
accusative case to its object in both uses. The activity-accomplishment
alternation is a common one cross-linguistically, and the assignment of
accusative objects to activity verbs occurs in a number of languages sanc
tioning this alternation. According to Van Valin (personal communica
tion), this case-marking "reflects the canonical use of a verb and not its par
ticular interpretation in every clause in which it occurs."
Hence, one might conclude that such alternating activity verbs as edo
license accusative non-subject arguments on the basis of their accomplish
ment readings. Those activity verbs that do not have accomplishment read
ings should accordingly lack the possibility of accusatively case-marked
objects, and this appears to be the case. It is thus apparent that an addi
tional function of the ablative is that of coding the non-undergoer "object"
occurring with such activity verbs. Again, the dative, as the default case for
non-macrorole direct core arguments, can serve this function as well; as
seen above, the activity verb servio, "I serve," takes a dative object. Abla-
tively marked direct core arguments, however, outside of their use with cer
tain statives and their corresponding accomplishments, serve only this func
tion. Further, the ablative performs this function only with respect to a par
ticular class of activity predicates: those denoting use; otherwise, it serves
to signal the marked linkage described in (26).
We now examine the properties of the third class of exceptions to the
principle of marked linkage: the genitive "subject". Given the case-assign-