Knowledge Bank

Since the discovery of the two classes of intransitive verbs, unaccusativity has been examined by extensive studies in many languages including Japanese. Despite the consensus among scholars that unaccusativity is universal, they remain perplexed by certain intransitive verbs exhibiting properties of both unergatives and unaccusatives, a phenomenon known as an “unaccusative mismatch.” In Japanese, unergatives (e.g., aruk-u ‘walk,’ oyog-u ‘swim’) behave like unaccusatives when accompanied by the goal phrase -made ‘as far as,’ which takes place when a numeral quantifier (NQ) is separated from its host NP subject (i.e., NQ floating). This study posits that this mismatch can be explained through a lexical-semantic approach. Moreover, this study suggests that its proposed explanation can be extended to elucidate the other two mismatches: the compatibility with the ‘for x time’ and ‘in x time’ adverbials, and two interpretations in the -teiru construction.