| The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) states that two distinct syntactic classes of intransitive verbs exist: unergatives and unaccusatives. Unergatives have a subject at all levels of syntactic representation. Unaccusatives have an underlying object and a surface subject. Some researchers argue that the split in the intransitive class is more accurately characterized in semantic terms. I provide evidence that the split in the intransitive class in Spanish is syntactically encoded because the verbs selected by unaccusative diagnostics in Spanish cannot be predicted on the basis of their semantics alone.;The most productive diagnostics of unaccusativity in Spanish are shown to be the participial absolute, the participial adjective, the bare plural subject, and -dor nominalization. Object-to-subject raising provides supporting evidence for unaccusativity, but the distribution of verbs found in the construction appears to vary widely from speaker to speaker. Therefore, the construction does not serve as a strong test for unaccusativity in Spanish.;Unlike Italian, Spanish lacks unaccusative diagnostics that select all unaccusative verbs. The participial constructions select change of state and change of location unaccusative verbs. The -dor suffix chooses unergative verbs, and the bare plural subject selects a cross-section of unaccusatives and unergatives. Furthermore, none of the diagnostics select any psych-verbs in Spanish, and therefore no independent evidence exists to claim that Spanish psych-verbs are unaccusatives.;A strict lexical semantic approach does not adequately account for the behavior of verbs in participial constructions in English or Spanish or with bare plural subjects in Spanish. These facts argue for a constructional view of argument projection. These data, along with others in this project, argue against a predictable mapping of semantic roles onto grammatical relations, such as that supported by the uniform theta assignment hypothesis/UTAH (Baker 1988) and the Universal Alignment Hypothesis/UAH (Perlmutter and Postal 1984). |
