Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Various theoretical considerations that I will not go into here lead Pylkkänen (2002,
21-23) to postulate that the low applicative is best understood as a higher order predicate
that takes three arguments: the direct object, the oblique argument and the lexical verb.
But more importantly from a descriptive point of view, Pylkkänen also offers a number
of diagnostics for differentiating high and low applicatives, two of which I repeat here in
full (Pylkkänen 2002, 23):
DIAGNOSTIC 1: TRANSITIVITY RESTRICTIONS
Only high applicative heads should be able to combine with unergatives [agentive,
intransitive verbs, CJ]. Since a low applicative head denotes a relation between the
direct and indirect object, it cannot appear in a structure that lacks a direct object.
DIAGNOSTIC 2: VERB SEMANTICS
Since low applicatives imply a transfer of possession, they make no sense with verbs
that are completely static: for example, an event of holding a bag does not plausibly
result in the bag ending up in someone’s possession. High applicatives, on the other
hand, should have no problem combining with verbs such as hold: it is perfectly
plausible that somebody would benefit from a bag-holding event.
It should be fairly clear that the BNBV inal construction meets both of these criteria: given
the close association between compound verbs and the OO constructions in an
environment defined by the occurrence of a *bi-√ prefix verb, it is reasonable to assume
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