Chapter 5 - Verb Phrases(107) a In de zomer wordt er hier vaak gezwommen.
In the summer is it here frequently swum
‘In the summer, there is frequently swimming here’
b *In de zomer wordt er hier vaak verdronken.
In the summer is it here frequently drowned
‘In the summer, there is frequently drowning here’
This is to be expected given our analysis of the passive and the fact that unaccusatives
do not involve light verbs.
The event structure of intransitives is also a little problematic as we predict it to be
complex if intransitives involve light verbs, but a sentence like Sam smiled does not
obviously express a complex event structure. However, it is not impossible to think of
this as involving a situation in which Sam does something which results in a smile,
which is made more plausible by comparison with the overt light verb construction:
(108) a Sam smiled
b Sam did a smile
If intransitives are in fact formed from an underlying structure involving a ‘cognate
object’ and a light verb as suggested above, then the parallel between (108a) and (b) is
even stronger. We might therefore propose the following analysis of the event
structure:
(109) e = e 1 Æ e 2 : e 1 = ‘Sam did something’
e 2 = ‘there was a smile’
In all then the analysis of intransitives is relatively unproblematic.2.6 Multiple complement verbs
So far we have been concerned with verbs that have either one or two arguments, but
there are cases of verbs with more. In this section we will look at a number of verbs
which have three arguments, again trying to maintain the UTAH and using this as a
guide for the analysis of the VP’s structure.
Within the standard X-bar structure there are two positions in which we find
arguments: specifier and complement:
(110) XP
YParg X'
X YParg
Verbs with more than two arguments have therefore been considered as problematic.
However, once we consider the role of light verbs as assigners of -roles regulated by
the thematic verb, we can see that it is possible to extend the -roles assigning domain
of a thematic verb to more than two positions. This is essentially the approach we will
adopt here.
As a first case of a multiple complement verb, consider verbs of placement: