Transitivity and Change of State Verbs

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that semantic and pragmatic properties—as opposed to syntactic properties—are responsible for the variability found with transitive uses of change of state verbs. In particular, a variety of factors combine together to determine the argument expression options associated with an individual verb. These factors include controllability (the degree to which an event can be externally manipulated), causer type (whether the event is human driven or nonhuman driven), and subject-modification (whether the causer is in a modified or unmodified form). Finally, I argue that it is possible to predict how acceptable a verb sounds in a transitive construction by a statistical model that combines and weights these different factors.