unaccusative

English

Etymology

un- +‎ accusative, from the fact that in a nominative-accusative language, the accusative case, which marks the direct object of a transitive verb, typically marks the non-volitional role. In unaccusative verbs, the non-volitional arguments do not take the accusative case.

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /ˌʌnəˈkjuːzətɪv/

Adjective

unaccusative (not comparable)

1. (linguistics, of a verb) Intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent.
   • 2004, Andrew Radford, Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English, University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, →ISBN, →OCLC, §9.6, page 352:

         The light-verb analysis sketched here also offers us a way of accounting for the fact that in Early Modern English, the perfect auxiliary used with unaccusative verbs was be (as we saw in §7.6), whereas that used with transitive and unergative verbs was have.

Antonyms

• unergative
• transitive

Hyponyms

• intransitive

Related terms

• accusative

Noun

unaccusative (plural unaccusatives)

1. (linguistics) An unaccusative verb.
   • 1998, Eloise Jelinek, “The Projection of Arguments”, in Miriam Butt, Wilhelm Geuder, editors, Voice and Transitivity as Functional Projections in Yaqui:

     We have seen that Unergatives and Unaccusatives differ in 1) permitting the derivation of an Impersonal Passive, and 2) in licensing purpose clauses, since Unergatives have active subjects, and Unaccusatives do not.

Antonyms

• unergative

References

• “unaccusative verb” in the Lexicon of Linguistics (Utrecht institute of Linguistics)