Unaccusative
adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An unaccusative verb.
"We have seen that Unergatives and Unaccusatives differ in 1) permitting the derivation of an Impersonal Passive, and 2) in licensing purpose clauses, since Unergatives have active subjects, and Unaccusatives do not."
- 1 Intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent. not-comparable
"The light-verb analysis sketched here also offers us a way of accounting for the fact that in Early Modern English, the perfect auxiliary used with unaccusative verbs was be (as we saw in §7.6), whereas that used with transitive and unergative verbs was have."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The light-verb analysis sketched here also offers us a way of accounting for the fact that in Early Modern English, the perfect auxiliary used with unaccusative verbs was be (as we saw in §7.6), whereas that used with transitive and unergative verbs was have."
Etymology
From un- + accusative, from the fact that in a nominative-accusative language, the accusative case, which marks the direct object of a transitive verb, typically marks the non-volitional role. In unaccusative verbs, the non-volitional arguments do not take the accusative case.
More for "unaccusative"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.