The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. The Unaccusative Hypothesis has provided a rich context for debating whether syntactic behavior is semantically or lexically determined, the consequence of syntactic context, or a combination of these factors. No consensus has been reached. This book combines new approaches to the subject with several papers that have achieved a significant status, though formally unpublished.

This book is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. It focuses particularly on the causative/anticausative alternation, which the authors take to be a Voice alternation, and the formation of adjectival participles. The authors use data principally from English, German, and Greek to demonstrate that the presence of anticausative morphology does not have any truth-conditional effects, but that marked anticausatives involve more structure than their unmarked counterparts. This morphology is therefore argued to be...