Ergativity in German

Phase theory and prosodic spellout: The case of verbs

“…As has often been observed, the subjects of unaccusatives behave like direct objects in many ways, and are commonly taken to be internal arguments of their verb (Perlmutter 1978). They should therefore originate within VP, and seem to be able to stay there in languages like German under certain conditions (Grewendorf 1989). If the case features of subjects and the tense features of verbs can in principle be valued via Agree, verbs and subjects of unaccusatives might not be forced to leave their VP and may stay in situ.…”

Derived subjects in Kinyarwanda locative constructions

“…The main difference between these two kinds of verbs concerns the syntactic position of their subject NPs: whereas unergative verbs select their subjects as true external arguments in [Spec, ν], the subjects of unaccusative verbs are internal arguments and originate in the VP. Subjects of unaccusative constructions hence behave more like the objects of transitive verbs than like the subjects of transitive or unergative verbs (Burzio 1986;Grewendorf 1989;Levin and Rappaport-Hovav 1995).…”

Gradient auxiliary selection and impersonal passivization in German: an experimental investigation

“…The choice of the perfective auxiliary is also thought to involve a privileged syntactic relation between the subject and the object position and therefore to correlate with other syntactic properties of unaccusativity/unergativity, although, as pointed out by Grimshaw (1990; see also Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Everaert, in press), the structural distinction underlying the choice of auxiliaries is less transparent than for other diagnostics. 2 Impersonal passivization is due to the absorption of the subject theta-role and thus requires the presence of an external argument (Grewendorf 1989, Hoekstra & Mulder 1990; it is therefore regarded as a test for unergativity, since the single argument of unaccusative verbs is, by definition, internal.…”

“…One of the most exhaustive discussions of the relevance of the Unaccusative Hypothesis for German is presented by Grewendorf (1989) from a Government-Binding perspective. Adopting 'ergative hypothesis', Grewendorf shows that a range of phenomena including auxiliary selection, impersonal passivization, extraction processes, topicalization, and reflexivization, provide support for the existence of the syntactic distinction between unaccusative and unergative verbs.…”