unaccusative verb

The identification of unaccusative verbs in English is therefore based on other criteria.

English unaccusative verbs include die and fall, but not run or resign, which are unergative.

See the article on unaccusative verbs for details.

The vP in passives and unaccusative verbs (if even present) are not phases.

The ability to undergo this transformation is a frequently used test to distinguish unergative and unaccusative verbs.

Subjects of passive and unaccusative verbs may participate in resultative constructions:

But for unaccusative verbs, the subject is non-volitional and yet is not marked by the accusative.

Unaccusative verbs may not.

Unaccusative verbs thus contrast with unergative verbs.

Anticausative verbs are a subset of unaccusative verbs.

In Japanese, the grammaticality of sentences that appear to violate syntactic rules may signal the presence of an unaccusative verb.

The rules that determined which verbs took which auxiliaries were similar to those still observed in German and French (see unaccusative verb).

In these languages, unaccusative verbs combine with be, while unergative verbs combine with have.

"Unergative and Unaccusative Verbs in Yaqui".

Besides the above, unergative verbs differ from unaccusative verbs in the fact that, in some languages, they can be passivized to a limited extent.

An unaccusative verb's subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb, or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice.

Modern English only uses one perfect auxiliary (have), although archaic examples like "He is fallen/come" reflect the use of be with unaccusative verbs in earlier stages of the language.

Ser is also used with the past participle of some unaccusative verbs such as néixer, which in medieval and dialectal Catalan made their compound tenses with ser.

Unaccusative verbs tend to express a telic and dynamic change of state or location, while unergative verbs tend to express an agentive activity (not involving directed movement).

Note that when the subject is postverbal (motion verbs, unaccusative verbs) the clitic is banned and the past participle of compound forms (if any) is invariably masc.

In the latter type, the verbs which use 'be' as an auxiliary are unaccusative verbs, that is, intransitive verbs that often show motion not directly initiated by the subject or changes of state, such as 'fall', 'come', 'become'.

Although the terms are generally synonymous, some unaccusative verbs are more obviously anticausative, while others (fall, die, etc.) are not; it depends on whether causation is defined as having to do with an animate volitional agent (does "falling" means "being accelerated down by gravity" or "being dropped/pushed down by someone"?