Verb Types(39) a I broke the window
b she closed the door
c he shattered the glass
d they sank the ship
e the police exploded the bomb
f the gardener grew the tree
Most unaccusatives cannot appear transitively:
(40) a he arrived the letter
b they departed the train
c the magician appeared a rabbit
d the Romans lived the Picts in Scotland
Some can, however:
(41) a we sat the guests at the table
b he stood the ladder against the wall
c the rats spread the disease
d they ran a pipeline under the sea
In these cases, these verbs are unable to appear in there or locative inversion structures
and so again this may be another case of ambiguity:
(42) a there sat the host some guests at the table
b there spread the rats a disease
(43) a against the wall stood the builder a ladder
b under the sea ran the engineers a pipeline
These verbs that have a transitive and an unaccusative use are sometimes called
ergative verbs as the subject of the unaccusative version is interpreted the same as the
object of the transitive version:
(44) a [the ball] rolled across the pitch
b the players rolled [the ball] across the pitch
Languages which relate the subject of the intransitive verb with the object of a
transitive verb in terms of a shared case form, for example, are called Ergative
languages and while it is doubtful whether the phenomenon demonstrated in (44) has
anything to do with the ergativity we find in languages like Basque or Eskimo
languages such as Yupik, the term is a convenient one.
The transitive version of ergative verbs all have agentive subjects and theme
objects. A first attempt at representing the structure of a VP headed by an ergative
might be: