Chapter 5 - Verb Phrases(45) VP
DP V'
the butler V DP
opened the door
Unfortunately this is an entirely different set of -role assignments to what we
have previously found. We concluded above that the theme -role is assigned to the
specifier of a thematic verb, not its complement position. The agent, on the other hand,
was assigned to the specifier of a light verb taking a VP complement. If we are to
maintain the UTAH, either the structure in (45) is inaccurate, or our analyses of
unaccusative and light verbs is.
Moreover, the structure of the VP in (45) is simple, in comparison to that of verbal
complexes involving light verbs, as in (32), for example. Yet the event structure
expressed here is not simple. In the butler opened the door, there is an event involving
the butler doing something and an event involving the door being open and clearly the
first event causes the second. Hence the event structure is:
(46) e = e 1 Æ e 2 : e 1 = ‘the butler did something’
e 2 = ‘the door opened’
If (45) is the correct analysis, then there is a mismatch here between event structure
and syntactic structure whereas in other cases we have seen there has been an
isomorphism between the two.
2.3.1 Potential problems
If we accept (45), a number of puzzles arise. First consider the alternation between the
transitive and unaccusative uses of ergative verbs. Why does the subject go missing in
this alternation and not the object and why does the object become the subject? A
possible answer to the latter question is that the unaccusative verb is unable to assign
Case and hence the object must move to subject position to satisfy the Case Filter:
(47) the ship 1 may have [VP sunk t 1 ]
There is a fairly robust generalisation, named after the linguist who first noted it,
Luigi Burzio, that verbs which assign no -role to their subjects, do not assign
accusative Case to their objects. While Burzio’s Generalisation may offer a
description of what is going on in these cases, it is an unfortunate fact that the
generalisation has little in the way of explanatory content: why it should be that verbs
that have no subjects cannot assign accusative Case is entirely mysterious from this
perspective.
A second set of questions concerns the relationship between the transitive alternate
and the structure with a light verb and the unaccusative alternate:
agenttheme