Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of constraints on the conversion of the participle II in German, proposing a constraint-based lexical semantic approach. I argue against the widely accepted syntactic view which is based on the dichotomous distinction of intransitive verbs, which has been advanced by the Unaccusative Hypothesis [Perlmutter (1978)]. Several arguments are also given against the semantic view which is based on some aspectual notions such as ''telicity'', ''transformativity'' or ''terminativity''. The crucial constraints on the conversion of the participle II in German, it is argued, is instead two lexical semantic entailments, movement with a definite change of location and affectedness. These and other lexical semantic entailments in the sense of Dowty (1991) are encoded into the multiple inheritance type hierarchy of qfpsoa. The proposal made in this paper is based on the multiple inheritance hierarchy which is envisaged in a recent framework of head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. (Chungnam National University)

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call