unaccusative
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unaccusative
- /ˌʌnəˈkjuːzətɪv/ UK, US
Where it comes from
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.
adjective
- Intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent. 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.
Opposite: unergative, transitive
noun unaccusatives
- 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.
Opposite: unergative
Thesaurus
adjective
Opposite: unergative, transitive
noun
Opposite: unergative
Translations
Every language
adj intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent
| Español | inacusativo |
|---|
Talk about this word "unaccusative." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/unaccusative. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. unaccusative. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/unaccusative "unaccusative." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/unaccusative.Cite this
@misc{unaccusative_2026,
title = {unaccusative},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/unaccusative},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
