Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Chapter 5 - Verb Phrases

These objects are clearly strongly related to the verb themselves and are called
cognate objects. Unaccusative verbs, however, do not take cognate objects:

(17) a the letter arrived an arrival
b the magician appeared an appearance
c *the kettle sat a sit on the stove

Apparent exceptions to this can probably be accounted for in terms of the ambiguity of
the verb. For example:

(18) she lived an eventful life

The verb to live can mean something similar to reside as in (19):

(19) she lived in Paris

But it is clear that this is not what is meant in (18) and indeed it cannot have this
meaning in the presence of a cognate object. Thus, when it has the meaning reside the
verb cannot take a cognate object and this is precisely the meaning it has as an
unaccusative:

(20) a there lived Picts in the Highlands
b *there lived a woman an eventful life

Again, for the moment, we will not be concerned about why unaccusative verbs do not
take cognate objects, but will use this as a diagnostic for determining whether a verb is
unaccusative or not.
In the most straightforward case, ignoring the complexities of the there
construction for the moment, the theme argument is always the subject. If there is a
prepositional argument, this always appears behind the verb, presumably in
complement position. Thus the simplest assumption we could make for the structure of
a VP involving an unaccusative verb is:

(21) VP VP

DP V' DP V'

V V PP

Following the UTAH we might now claim to have discovered the position to which
the theme -role is assigned: the specifier of the VP.
It is important to point out at this stage that what we are looking at here is the VP at
D-structure, i.e. prior to any movement process and not the complete analysis of a full
sentence. We will see that this is more complex, involving more structure and a greater
number of syntactic processes. In particular, it is common for the subject not to remain
in the VP, but to move out into a higher position in the clause:

(22) the letter 1 may not have [t 1 arrived]

theme

loc

theme