This book examines in detail the acceptability status of sentences in the following five English constructions, and elucidates the syntactic, semantic, and functional requirements that the constructions must satisfy in order to be appropriately used: There-Construction, (One’s) Way Construction, Cognate Object Construction, Pseudo-Passive Construction, and Extraposition from Subject NPs. It has been argued in the frameworks of Chomskyan generative grammar, relational grammar, conceptual semantics and other syntactic theories that the acceptability of sentences in these constructions can be accounted for by the unergative–unaccusative distinction of intransitive verbs. However, this book shows through a wide range of sentences that none of these constructions is sensitive to this distinction. For each construction, it shows that acceptability status is determined by a given sentence's semantic function as it interacts with syntactic constraints (which are independent of the unergative–unaccusative distinction), and with functional constraints that apply to it in its discourse context.

Table of contents

Acknowledgement ix

1. Introduction 1–29

2. The there-construction and unaccusativity 31–65

3. The way construction and unergativity Co-authored with Karen Courtenay and Nan Decker 67–104

4. The cognate object construction and unergativity 105–135

5. The pseudo-passive construction and unergativity 137–168

6. Extraposition from subject NPs and unaccusativity 169–187

7. Conclusion 189–197

Notes 199–224

References 225–233

Name index 235

Subject index 237