The Double Unaccusative Construction in Sinitic Languages
Résumé
The present study examines a syntactically aberrant construction in Sinitic languages which I provisionally label the "double unaccusative".This construction represents a clear example of a syntactic construction where the rules of grammar, narrowly understood, are violated: in the double unaccusative, intransitive process verbs take two arguments, one more argument than the verb valency should allow, recalling the “one-too-many-argument” problem described in Shibatani (1994).
The two arguments of the intransitive verb designate possessor (PR) and possessum (PM). Furthermore, the nouns in this possessive relationship occur discontinuously and belong to different constituents. Specifically, the noun appears in the canonical position for grammatical subject (S) clause-initially while the PM appears postverbally in the canonical object position (O).
Double unaccusative construction:
NOUN (POSSESSOR) -- INTRANSITIVE VERB -- NOUN (PART/KIN TERM)