On coming the pub in the North West of England: accusative unaccusatives, dependent case, and preposition incorporation

Abstract

Some English dialects in the North West of England allow the complements of certain motion verbs to surface with no visible preposition to, producing strings like John came the pub with me, which are ungrammatical in other dialects of English. This paper offers a detailed description of this understudied construction, showing that the Goal argument has a mixture of direct object properties and PP object properties. To explain this mixture of properties, it is proposed that the Goal argument in this construction is introduced in a PP headed by a silent preposition TO, but subsequently moves into spec-vP, the final position of direct objects, receiving accusative case there. Since some of the verbs that enter into this construction are unaccusative, this analysis reinforces a conclusion regarding accusative case already reached in the dependent case literature: assignment of accusative must be decoupled from the assignment of an external argument theta-role, contra classical formulations of Burzio’s Generalization.