Basic English Grammar with Exercises - MEK

Chapter 5 - Verb Phrases(45) VPDPV'the butler VDPagentopenedthemethe doorUnfortunately this is an entirely different set of -role assignments to what wehave previously found. We concluded above that the theme -role is assigned to thespecifier of a thematic verb, not its complement position. The agent, on the other hand,was assigned to the specifier of a light verb taking a VP complement. If we are tomaintain the UTAH, either the structure in (45) is inaccurate, or our analyses ofunaccusative and light verbs is.Moreover, the structure of the VP in (45) is simple, in comparison to that of verbalcomplexes involving light verbs, as in (32), for example. Yet the event structureexpressed here is not simple. In the butler opened the door, there is an event involvingthe butler doing something and an event involving the door being open and clearly thefirst event causes the second. Hence the event structure is:(46) e = e 1 → e 2 : e 1 = ‘the butler did something’e 2 = ‘the door opened’If (45) is the correct analysis, then there is a mismatch here between event structureand syntactic structure whereas in other cases we have seen there has been anisomorphism between the two.2.3.1 Potential problemsIf we accept (45), a number of puzzles arise. First consider the alternation between thetransitive and unaccusative uses of ergative verbs. Why does the subject go missing inthis alternation and not the object and why does the object become the subject? Apossible answer to the latter question is that the unaccusative verb is unable to assignCase and hence the object must move to subject position to satisfy the Case Filter:(47) the ship 1 may have [ VP sunk t 1 ]There is a fairly robust generalisation, named after the linguist who first noted it,Luigi Burzio, that verbs which assign no -role to their subjects, do not assignaccusative Case to their objects. While Burzio’s Generalisation may offer adescription of what is going on in these cases, it is an unfortunate fact that thegeneralisation has little in the way of explanatory content: why it should be that verbsthat have no subjects cannot assign accusative Case is entirely mysterious from thisperspective.A second set of questions concerns the relationship between the transitive alternateand the structure with a light verb and the unaccusative alternate:164