Chapter 5 - Verb Phrasesmodified by the purpose clause. The ungrammaticality of this sentence with this
interpretation demonstrates that expletive it is unable to license this kind of modifier.
When the thematic subject is raised, however, the purpose clause is grammatical. The
quasi-argument weather predicate it appears to behave like a thematic argument in this
respect as it does license a purpose clause. Obviously I do not want to claim that the
there subject in there constructions is the same thing as a weather predicate’s quasi-
argument subject.
But I have discussed this phenomenon to demonstrate that there are different
degrees of argumenthood and the claim I want to make is that there is somewhere
between a thematic argument and an expletive, which is supported by the fact that
purpose clauses can appear with there subjects:
(71) a water ran down the cliff face [to hide the mouth of the cave]
b there ran water down the cliff face [to hide the mouth of the cave]
Now let us suppose that this connection between the light verb and its restricted
subject, although it is not enough to license accusative Case, is strong enough to
license a Case that can be born by indefinites (perhaps partitive). We then have an
explanation for why the post-verbal theme is restricted to indefinite DPs. All in all
then, the supposition of a (very) light verb in the there construction leads to quite an
explanatory account of many of its properties.
2.4 Transitive verbs
It is time we turned our attention to those verbs that traditional grammars seem to
consider more central: transitive and intransitive verbs. What we have said so far has
far reaching repercussions for the analysis of these verbal subcategories. We will start
discussing these with respect to the transitives.
A transitive verb is one that has an object, i.e. a DP complement, and a subject. The
subject may be agent and the object patient, or the subject could be an experiencer and
the object theme. Patient and theme, from this perspective, differ in terms of a notion
of affectedness: a patient is affected by the action described by the verb while a theme
is unaffected by it:
(72) a Sam sawed the wood (to pieces)
b Sam saw the wood (*to pieces)
In (72a) we have the past tense form of the verb to saw, Sam is an agent and the wood
is patient. In this cases a resultative modifier like to pieces can be used to describe the
state of the object after being acted upon. In (72b) we have the past tense form of the
verb to see, Sam is an experiencer and the wood is an unaffected theme. Obviously in
these cases the resultative is inappropriate because nothing directly happens to the
object as a result of being seen. We will put the case of the experiencer–theme type
transitives to one side for the moment and start our discussion with the agent–patient
type.
Above we found that the agent -role was assigned by a light verb which takes a
VP complement. If we assume that the patient is a kind of theme, we might expect that
it is assigned to the specifier of a main verb: