ABSTRACT
The erroneous sentences listed, although different from each other, are all related to inchoative and causative usage of unaccusative verbs. With the interest on meaning study resuming during the 1990s, researchers start to note the connection between verb meaning and usage. A seminal work was done by Levin, where the author studied four types of syntactically different transitive verbs from a semantic perspective and concluded with an influential argument stating that the different syntactic properties in the four verbs were triggered by the differences at their semantic level. From the perspective of primitive predicate analysis, the inchoative meaning of break-type verbs describes an event of achievement, while its causative meaning denotes an even of accomplishment. Bowerman, for example, collected spontaneous speech data of her two daughters and observed overgeneralization of intransitive verbs used in the transitive form. These causative errors, according to her, were triggered by the existence of verbs that could participate in the causative/inchoative alternation.
