THE LOCATIVE ALTERNATION

The main purpose of this study is to show that the locative alternation (LA) is an instantiation of an unaccusative construction. Th is point is supported by both syntactic evidence and a corpus analysis of subject placement in Spanish.From a syntactic point of vie w, the prepositional objects that characterize the LA, which are conceptually necessary, are claimed to generate the argument struct ure for the whole sentence as an unaccusative construction: [VP D [V [PP]]]. This construction may either entail a notion of change of state ...[Read more]