This course offers an introduction to the notion of unaccusativity (also known as ‘split intransitivity’) and explores the extent to which the unaccusative/unergative distinction can be motivated by the lexical-semantic properties of verbs.
We begin by reviewing the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter, 1978), the main approaches to unaccusativity – i.e., syntactic and (syntactico-)semantic – and some of the key diagnostics of the intransitivity split, including perfect auxiliary selection, ne-cliticisation, and word order (Perlmutter, 1978; Burzio, 1986). Particular attention is given to approaches in which unaccusativity is regarded as semantically determined (e.g., Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995).
The course then turns to the role of verb meaning, examining the hypothesis that many aspects of a verb’s syntactic behaviour are determined by its membership in a semantically coherent class (Fillmore, 1970; Levin, 1993; Pinker, 2013; among others). This leads to an introduction to lexical decomposition approaches, verb classes and alternations (Levin, 1993), and a discussion of the importance of isolating the grammatically relevant aspects of meaning. Special attention is paid to change-of-state verbs, the notion of scalar change and degree achievements (Hay et al., 1999; Beavers, 2008; 2013).
The course concludes by examining a gradient view of unaccusativity (Sorace, 2000) and by discussing perfect auxiliary selection in Italian: by looking at original data (Tobyn, 2025), we consider how verb meaning might be a predictor of Italian unaccusative morpho-syntax.
(No prior knowledge of unaccusativity or verb semantics is required to attend this course, although some familiarity with basic notions such as lexical aspect will be helpful.)

Reading list (initial draft)

• Beavers, J. (2008). Scalar complexity and the structure of events. In J. Dölling, T. Heyde-Zybatow, & M. Schäfer (Eds.), Event structures in linguistic form and interpretation (pp. 245–266). De Gruyter.
• Beavers, J. (2013). Aspectual classes and scales of change. Linguistics, 51(4), 681–706.
• Burzio, L. (1986). Italian syntax: A government-binding approach. Dordrecht: Reidel. [selections, to be announced]
• Fillmore, C. J. (1970). The grammar of hitting and breaking. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar (pp. 120–133). Waltham: Ginn.
• Hay, J., Kennedy, C., & Levin, B. (1999). Scalar structure underlies telicity in degree achievements. In T. Matthews & D. Strolovitch (Eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (SALT IX) (pp. 127–144). Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, Cornell University.
• Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (1995). Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [selections, to be announced]
• Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 157–189. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California.
• Pinker, S. (2013). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [selections, to be announced]
• Sorace, A. (2000). Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs. Language, 76, 859–890.
• Tobyn, E. (2025). Non-standard bilingualism in Italy and the semantics of unaccusative verbs. PhD thesis. Manchester: University of Manchester. [selections, to be announced]