On Ergativization of Intransitive Verbs

Bc. Hana Macková

Master's thesis

Abstract:

The topic of my thesis are what Davidse (1998) calls ergative causatives of intransitive verbs, i.e. a subtype of causative constructions, which are built from primarily intransitive verbs and have two animate participants. These constructions are called by other various names such induced action causatives (Levin), causative accomplishment movement verbs (Van Valin) or double agentive causatives. This construction is a rather restricted phenomenon in the English language and there exist various conditions on its use. In the existing literature one still finds a number of unresolved questions and disputes. In my thesis, I will try to examine closely the semantic and syntactic structure of this construction type, I am going to look at its participants and at the particular type of verbs entering this causative type. These constructions occur only with limited set of verbs, especially manner of motion verbs. In her book, Levin (1993) introduces various subgroups of verbs, some of which allow this induced action alternation. It is quite obvious that some verbs of these groups appear in this construction type more often than others. This will be later examined in the practical part of the thesis. First part of my practical research will be comparing and contrasting the various senses of these verbs based on the definitions in some major dictionaries of English. In the next part, I will try to find out which verbs occur in this construction in the actual usage and I will evaluate the actual occurrence of these verbs using two corpuses, namely British National Corpus (BNC) and Google. I will also examine the various nouns that the verbs in this construction combine with and how the relationship between participants differs in various types of these causatives.

Keywords

causation, ergativization, agent, Initiator, transitivity, directional phrase

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 29. 5. 2007

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 11. 6. 2007
• Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, CSc.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Master programme / field:
Philology / English Language and Literature