Martha McGinnis: Unaccusatives and special meaning (reply to Dan Everett)

[Martha McGinnis]

I think Dan may have misread my message.  The examples I gave were
supposed to be idiosyncratic uses.  The degree of idiosyncrasy varies
a bit, as it does in the L&R examples: in "the sun rose", the sun
really rises (in some naive-science sense); in "X's eyes popped",
something really happens to X's eyes, though it's not clear that it's
the usual sense of "popping"; in "the penny dropped," there are no
pennies and no dropping, in the usual sense.  But yes, the whole
point of my message was that these are intransitive phrasal idioms,
whose idiomatic sense doesn't carry over to the transitive
counterpart.

>The first comment that comes to mind is that the examples Martha uses to
>illustrate symmetry are all nonliteral, frequent but idiosyncratic
>constructions that do not seem to generalize. It is unlikely that one could
>find similar examples with similar properties in other languages, especially
>nonIndo-European. And if one did, I suspect that they too would be
>nonliteral and of little generality.
>
>But this gratuitous opinion of mine is not based on any research whatsoever.
>
>DLE


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca