The Unaccusative Hypothesis and the Impersonal Construction in French

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that the Impersonal Contruction (IC) of French, which displays unaccusative syntax but allows unergative verbs, refutes the Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) and the principles of lexically driven mapping. It is demonstrated that three types of argument intended to explain unaccusative mismatches are untenable while maintaining the UH. An account of the verbs appearing in the IC is proposed, based on the principles of free linking of arguments and postsyntactic compositional interpretation, taking into account meaning contributed by diverse sources, including lexical, syntactic, constructional, and morphological meaning, which must be compatible. It is argued that the shape of IC sentences requires that a state of affairs be predicated of a locative; various consequences for verb and argument selection and tense arise from this requirement. By removing certain semantico-syntactic functions from the lexicon, economy is achieved in both the lexicon and the syntactic component.