ON THE AMBIVALENCE OF VERBS OF SUBSTANCE EMISSION
ON THE AMBIVALENCE OF VERBS OF SUBSTANCE EMISSION

Summary/Abstract: Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between verbs of substance emission and adjectival perfect participles in Romanian and, tangentially, in English. Although most verbs of substance emission ban adjectival perfect participles predicated of emitter arguments, some of them seem to license participles with adjectival uses. However, a closer look reveals that adjectival participles are derived from concurrent verbs of change of state, allowing one to maintain the dissociation between verbs of substance emission and adjectival participles. Importantly, in languages like English or Romanian, the verbs that express events that can be conceptualized either as substance emission activities or as (activities that result in) changes of state on the emitter are cross-classified as unergatives and unaccusatives. In such languages, unaccusativity is diagnosed by adjectival perfect participles, which lean on a change of state construal.

• Details
• Contents