Verb Types(48) a Mike made the ball bounce
b Mike bounced the ball
How come these structures mean virtually the same thing, especially as, as we have
seen, light verbs are not without meaning? Note that the subject of the ergative verb in
(48b) is interpreted as the causer of the ball’s bouncing, which is exactly the same
interpretation given to the subject of make, a causative verb. The event structure of
both examples is also the same:
(49) e = ei Æ ej : ei = ‘Mike did something’
ej = ‘the ball bounced’
But while the syntactic structure of (48a) is isomorphic with the event structure in (49),
if we analyse the sentence in (48b) as having a structure like (45) then the syntactic
isomorphism with the event structure is completely lost.
2.3.2 Light verbs and ergatives
One way to solve all these problems in one go would be to assume that the structure of
the transitive alternate of an ergative verb is as follows:
(50) vP
DP v'
Mike v VP
e DP V'
the ball V
bounce
Under this analysis, the UTAH can be maintained as each argument sits in exactly
the position it should according to our previous analyses: the theme is the specifier of
the main verb and the agent is the specifier of the abstract light verb. Moreover the
event structure is represented in an isomorphic way with there being two parts to the
syntactic structure each of which relate to the relevant sub-event.
The disadvantages of this analysis are: i) there is an empty light verb and ii) the
wrong word order is predicted. The supposition of the empty verb is, of course, not a
problem in itself. We have seen a number of instances of empty categories that are
well justified and enable us to provide accounts for phenomena that would otherwise
be mysterious. As long as we can independently justify the assumption of an empty
element, given that language apparently makes use of such things, there is no problem
in the assumption itself. There is both semantic and syntactic evidence of the existence
of the empty light verb. We will return to the latter, but the semantic evidence is fairly
obvious: the structure is interpreted as a causative and the presence of this meaning
justifies the assumption of a light verb which provides it. Similarly, the presence of a
‘causer’ argument justifies the assumption of a predicate which assigns the relevant -