Discourse and unaccusativity
Patricia Irwin · 2021
This paper brings together syntactic analysis with corpus results to argue that a subset of unaccusative verb phrases, those with verbs that typically denote motion or manner of motion (e.g. arrive, walk in) share a discourse property with there BE sentences - that of establishing a new discourse referent. The theoretical motivation for the corpus experiment is an analysis in which verbs like arrive and walk in occur in an “existential unaccusative” structure, a structure in which part of the denotation of the VP is McNally’s (1992, 1997) function INSTANTIATE, which triggers the establishment of a discourse referent in existential sentences (see also McCloskey 2014). Results from a corpus experiment are presented in which the ratio of indefinite/definite subjects of existential unaccusative sentences is compared to that of unergative sentences. The comparison of these ratios was found to be statistically significant, where the comparatively greater number of indefinite subjects of existential unaccusative sentences was not the result of chance. The utility and limits of corpus experiments for syntactic theory is discussed. It is argued that corpus data can inform syntactic theory, though the limits of corpus data for supporting or refuting specific syntactic models is acknowledged