Suggested Answers for Check Questions

Unaccusatives are typically movement or locative verbs, they cannot appear in causative constructions. They can take an expletive ‘there’ as subject but that does not count as an argument. They take one argument, a theme, but some of them may optionally take a locative PP as an argument. They do not take objects, they cannot be passivised. Intransitives also take one argument but that one argument is either an agent or an experiencer. They cannot appear in a ‘there’ construction. Some of them can appear with objects which are termed ‘cognate objects’. They cannot passivise in English but they can indeed do so in other languages, e.g. in German. Ergatives typically involve a change of state. They cannot appear in ‘there’ constructions either but they can in a transitive context as well as in causative constructions, in fact, causatives manifest the transitive use of an ergative. When an ergative verb is used in a transitive context, its agent argument is in [Spec, vP] and its theme argument is in [Spec, VP].