Some transitivity alternations in English

The remarks which follow pertain to a particular facet of a generallexicographic study of verbal diathesis currently being undertaken in connection with the Lexicon Project of the Center for Cognitive Science at MIT. The overall aim of the project is to design lexical entries, primarily for predicators, which will express the linguistic knowledge which a speaker of a given languag~ possesses in relation to lexical items. Our more limited purpose in this paper is to discuss certain alternations in the syntax of English verbs, specifically, alternations in transitivity which are not reflected by corresponding alternations in morphological form. The aim, in general, is to determine the minimum which must be said in a lexical entry in order to account for this particular aspect of English lexical knowledge. And our methodological approach is one which seeks, where possible, to rely solely upon principles which have been shown to be independently necessary within a well articulated general theory of grammar, in this instance, the theory developed in ~homsky's Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and in a variety of publications since. The ideas which we employ in this discussion are, for the most part, ideas which are around, in the literature and in unpublished papers and discussions, and we wish to apologize in advance for the almost inevitable occasions in which we will fail properly to attribute them to their true originators. In the first section of the paper, a certain amount of descriptive apparatus is set up to account for the observed syntactic behavior of selected English verb types. In the second and third sections, we setabout dismantling this apparatus, in so far as we can, in an effort to arrive at an understanding of thefundamental grammatical elements involved. This is a preliminary -version of our work, and assumptions ·made early in the paper will be contradicted, intentionally, in later parts. Our terminological usage in this preliminary version is also somewhat inconsistent. Thus, for example, we first use the terms ergative and unaccusative interchangeably. Later,. however, we will 'distinguish "ergatives" (like break, operz etc.) which have transitive and intransitive uses, from "unaccusatives', (like appear, arrive, arise, etc.), which have only the intransitive use but also allow There-Insertion..There are other rough spots in the exposition which we will attempt to eliminate in later versions.