intransitive "making"

[Laurence Horn]

Another take on this:  the distinction made in Relational Grammar since
David Perlmutter's Berkeley Linguistics Society article in 1978 is that
there are two classes of intransitive verbs, those like "smoke" or "eat"
that have an underlying subject (corresponding to the subject of the
corresponding transitive, if any) and those like "sink" or "melt" or
"arrive" that have an underlying object (corresponding to the object of the
corresponding transitive, if any).  The former class is called
"unergative", the latter "unaccusative".  In the case of an unaccusative
intransitive, the object becomes a subject (sort of like what happens with
passives, but here there's no agent to 'demote').  Notice that some of
these alternate with transitives, in which the object remains object (We
baked the cookies, The cookies baked), while other unaccusatives don't
alternate (My relatives arrived early).  Additional evidence for the
"unaccusative hypothesis" comes from a variety of languages; where there's
a correlation (although an imperfect one) with auxiliary choice and
ne-clitic formation in Italian, impersonal passives in German and Dutch,
subject case marking in Lakhota, and so on.  Within GB (and its
descendants), i.e. whatever theory Chomsky and his colleagues and students
have practiced, Burzio proposed an analogue of Perlmutter's unaccusative
hypothesis in his 1981 thesis, only he labeled the underlying-object class
"ergative verbs" rather than unaccusatives.  The problem here is that the
relevant argument of such verbs in ergative languages (e.g. "the cookies"
in "The cookies baked in the oven" and "He baked the cookies in the oven")
is the one NOT in the ergative case (which is assigned to the transitive
subject, i.e. the baker); rather it's in the so-called absolutive.  Burzio
also confusingly restricted the notion of "intransitive verb" to the
non-ergatives, so "arrive" for him is not intransitive.  So most linguists
who work on these things, even those (like Beth Levin and Jane Grimshaw)
who don't adopt the Relational Grammar framework, have adopted the
"unaccusative" label for verbs (and clauses) like the ones discussed in
this thread.  From Lynne's evidence, "make" can now (like "brew" and
"bake") be used as an unaccusative, i.e. in intransitive clauses with an
underlying object and no underlying subject.  (Notice that many
intransitives, like "cook" and "bake", can be either unergative OR
unaccusative:  "My uncle is cooking" can be one or the other depending on
whether he's serving as the preparer of the meal or as the preparation.
        One more point:  These unaccusative clauses are crucially
non-agentive on every level of analysis--the boat can sink without anyone
sinking it, and even cookies can bake on their own (in the sun); they
contrast with yet another construction involving a non-agent subject where
there is an agent present in conceptual structure but not in the grammar:

        The book is selling like hotcakes.
        The meat cuts like butter.
        The door opens with a skeleton key.
        Shakespeare translates easily.
        You bruise easily.
        the soup that eats like a meal

These have recently been called (probably misleadingly) "middles" and are
not distinguishable from unaccusatives, even when the same lexical verb is
involved, by a variety of tests, perhaps the simplest being that there is
always an understood agent in these.  (Compare "The door opens with a
skeleton key" [agent understood] vs. "The door opened" [no agent].)
Middles (unlike accusatives) are also much easier to get with adverbs.

larry

At 8:12 AM -0500 11/28/99, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>Benjamin,
>
>You are looking for the word "ergative."
>
>We baked the cookies in the oven.
>The cookies baked in the oven.
>
>As opposed to "real" transitives:
>
>We ate the cookies in the kitchen.
>*The cookies ate in the theater.
>
>Note, however, that ergatives and transitives can both passivize, that
>operation sometimes falsely suggested as a test for transitives.
>
>So, if you reclassify (by analogy) "make" as an ergative (on the model of
>"bake"), you've got it made.
>
>dInIs
>
>
>
>
>
>>FWIW, this sounds like a special usage for some verbs like bake:
>>
>>(1) The cookies are baking.
>>
>>I don't remember what this is called, but I think it's an intransitive usage
>>of certain transitive verbs.
>>
>>To me, at least, this sentence does *not* seem intransitive, it seems closer
>>to being a transformation of
>>
>>(2) The cookies are being baked.
>>
>>Benjamin Barrett
>>gogaku at ix.netcom.com
>>
>>------Original Message-----
>>-From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On
>>-Behalf Of M. Lynne Murphy
>>-
>>-I've never heard "spendy", but twice this week I've heard the
>>-following from
>>-members of the same family (they're from North Carolina and Georgia):
>>-
>>-The coffee is making.
>>-
>>-(i.e., the coffee is brewing)
>>-
>>-Is this an intrafamily usage, or is this widespread/regional?
>>-
>>-Lynne
>
>
>Dennis R. Preston
>Department of Linguistics and Languages
>Michigan State University
>East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
>preston at pilot.msu.edu
>Office: (517)353-0740
>Fax: (517)432-2736