Morphologically（语义的形态学动机）.pdfVIP

Morphologically Motivated Lexical-Semantic Representations: The Causative Alternation and Change-of - State Verbs in Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) Abstract Levin and Rapport Hovav (1995) (LRH) have argued that LEXICAL-SEMANTIC REPRESENTATIONS for unaccusative verbs fall into two classes depending on whether they participate in the CAUSATIVE ALTERNATION. Unaccusatives that participate in the alternation, what they call the change-of-state class, have underlyingly transitive Lexical-Semantic Representations; those that do not, their inherently-directed motion, appearance/disappearance, and existence classes, have underlyingly intransitive Lexical-Semantic Representations. A crucial corollary of this claim is that all change- of-state unaccusatives participating in the alternation are derived from their corresponding transitive-lexical causatives. I will demonstrate that the Causative Alternation is not a valid diagnostic for determining Lexical-Semantic Representations. By expanding LRH’s database to include Japanese, Turkish, Korean, and Armenian, I will show that the change-of-state verbs, which LRH classify as a single type, are dichotomous between underlyingly transitive and intransitive types, consisting of EXTERNALLY and INTERNALLY CAUSED EVENTUALITIES, respectively. In other words, the LRH analysis holds only for one of two semantic subclasses of change-of-state verbs. I then motivate Lexical-Semantic Representations for change-of-state verbs in line with this data. The result is a more finely grained semantic classification, but one that does not map one-to-one onto syntax. 1 1. Introduction In the introduction to their influential monograph on unaccusative verbs, Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) (LRH) declare the scope and goal of the hypothesis they defend: (W)e call regularities in the association of arguments bearing certain semantic