Verb Classes

In this chapter, we group verbs into 15 classes based on the syntactic (or argument) alternations they may license – transitive, unergative, unmarked unaccusative, and marked unaccusative. We examine the properties of each class across different Romance languages using data from previous studies, dictionaries, grammars, and corpora. Results show that the distribution of the verbs in the classes can be accounted for cross-linguistically in semantic and/or aspectual terms, although differences among the languages can be detected, particularly as regards the distribution of the pronominal form in unaccusative uses.