Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Verb Types

and that these are passed up to it by a process similar to projection – something which
has been called extended projection, in fact. It would then depend on the thematic
verb how the argument of the light verb was to be interpreted, as a causer, not directly
seen as the agent of the thematic verb, or as a direct agent of that verb. We might
visualise this in the following way:

(83) vP

DP v'

v VP

V'

V

If this is right, then the agent subject of the light verb involved with transitive verbs
will receive its -role indirectly from the main verb, via the light verb, and hence will
be interpreted as the argument of the thematic verb. Of course the actual assignment of
the -role will be dependent on the presence of the light verb, as by the UTAH roles
such as agent can only be assigned to the specifier of a light verb.

2.4.3 Agent and experiencer subjects
What about the event structure of a transitive construction? Above we argued for an
isomorphism between the structure of the VP and the structure of the event it describes
such that each part of the VP corresponds to a separate sub-event. If transitive verbs
involve an agentive light verb, and hence there are two parts to the verbal complex, we
should expect that the event described by a transitive verb should consist of two sub-
events. But we have just seen that transitives are not causative: Harry hit Ron does not
mean that Harry does something that causes Ron to get hit. However, there is not
necessarily a direct relationship between what the subject does and the object getting
hit. Consider the following:

(84) a Harry hit Ron with his hand
b Harry hit Ron with a stick
c Harry hit Ron with a stone

We can see from these examples there is a sense in which there are two parts to a
hitting event: somebody does something and somebody or something gets hit as a
more or less direct result of this. There is obviously a very subtle difference between
this interpretation and a causative one, which we will not attempt to describe here. The
point is that the event structure of the transitive can be represented in a similar way to
that of a causative:

(85) e = e 1 Æ e 2 : e 1 = ‘Harry did something’
e 2 = ‘Ron got hit’

Now let us turn our attention to verbs of perception which take experiencer
subjects.

-role

projection

extended

projection

projection