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An unergative verb is an intransitive verb [1] that is characterized semantically by having a subject argument which is an agent that actively initiates the action expressed by the verb. For example, in English, talk and resign in the sentence "You talk and you resign" are unergative verbs, since they are intransitive (one does not say "you ...
English irregular verbs are now a closed group, which means that newly formed verbs are always regular and do not adopt any of the irregular patterns. This list only contains verb forms which are listed in the major dictionaries as being standard usage in modern English. There are also many thousands of archaic, non-standard and dialect variants.
Irregular verbs in Modern English include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit , from ...
For example, in Dutch and Turkish, unergative verbs can be used in impersonal passive constructions, but unaccusative verbs cannot. [11] In the following example from Dutch, the verb is unergative, describing a voluntary action, and can be made passive: Er wordt hier veel geskied. "A lot of skiing is done here." (lit. "it is skied much here")
English also has a number of so-called ergative verbs, where the object of the verb when transitive is equivalent to the subject of the verb when intransitive. When English nominalizes a clause, the underlying subject of an intransitive verb and the underlying object of a transitive verb are both marked with the possessive case or with the ...
In some ambitransitive verbs are ergative verbs for which the alignment of the syntactic arguments to the semantic roles is exchanged. An example of this is the verb break in English. (1) He broke the cup. (2) The cup broke. In (1), the verb is transitive, and the subject is the agent of
To some extent it may be a matter of convention or subjective preference to state whether a verb is regular or irregular. In English, for example, if a verb is allowed to have three principal parts specified (the bare infinitive, past tense and past participle), then the number of irregular verbs will be drastically reduced (this is not the ...