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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 ...
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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")
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
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 ...
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.
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 generative linguistics, Burzio's generalization is the observation that a verb can assign a theta role (a title used to describe the relationship between the noun phrase and the predicate, such as agent, theme, and goal) to its subject position if and only if it can assign an accusative case to its object.