世新大學圖書館

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-11, Section: A, page: 3764.

Adviser: Christopher Kennedy.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Northwestern University, 2001.

Current linguistic theories classify verbs together according to shared semantic and syntactic properties. This dissertation explores one particular class of verbs—<italic>change of state verbs</italic>. Specifically, I examine an important subdivision within the change of state class—the division between <italic>internally caused change of state verbs</italic> and <italic>externally caused change of state verbs</italic>. Using both corpus data and constructed data, I demonstrate that while these verbs share many similarities, they can be distinguished by important differences.

A key similarity between both classes of verbs is participation in the causative/inchoative alternation: both internally caused and externally caused change of state verbs can be used in intransitive and corresponding transitive forms. However, corpus searches indicate that their transitive occurrences differ in many ways, including differences in frequency of occurrence, acceptability ratings, and causer-types.

I account for these differences with the following analysis. First, I propose distinctions in the basic and derived semantic representations for internally caused and externally caused change of state verbs. Underlyingly, internally caused change of state verbs involve monadic representations, consisting of a single subevent (the change of state), which can give rise to causative structures via Template Augmentation. Meanwhile, externally caused change of state verbs involve underlying dyadic representations, consisting of a complex event structure containing both an external cause and the resulting change of state; intransitive structures can then be derived through detransitivization.

Second, I argue that three important semantic and pragmatic factors can further help to account for differences between internally caused and externally caused change of state verbs. Specifically, I examine differences in causer type, range of causers, and locus of control and show that these factors play a significant role in predicting differences across verbs in the change of state class.

This detailed semantic analysis of change of state verbs accounts for the general similarities in their argument expression, but also accounts for subtle differences in their individual behavior.

School code: 0163.