Section 1.1 provides a brief survey of some salient syntactic, morphological, and semantic characteristics of verbs. Section 1.2 reviews a number of semantic and syntactic classifications of verbs and proposes a partly novel classification that combines some of these proposals; this classification will be the starting point for the detailed discussion of nominal complementation of main verbs in Chapter 2. Section 1.3 discusses verbal inflection, while Sections 1.4 and 1.5 discuss a number of semantic notions related to verbs: tense, mood/modality, and aspect.

Main verbs project in the sense that they can take arguments (cf. Chapter 2 to Chapter 5) and that the resulting projections can be modified by a large set of adverbial phrases (Chapter 8). We will begin the discussion of argument structure by focusing on the adicity of verbs, i.e. the number and type of arguments they can take. The traditional classification is usually based on the number of nominal arguments that verbs take, i.e. whether a verb is intransitive, transitive or ditransitive.

Chapter 2, however, provides evidence that a satisfactory classification must take into account not only the number but also the type of arguments: we need to distinguish between what has become known as unergative and unaccusative verbs, which exhibit systematic differences in syntactic behavior. Since the distinction is relatively new (it was first proposed in Perlmutter, 1978, and received wider recognition after Burzio, 1981/1986) but plays an important role throughout this study, we will briefly introduce it below (although we will use the term intransitive verb instead of unergative verb for reasons that will become clear in Section 2.1).

Unaccusative verbs never take an accusative object. The subjects of these verbs have a similar semantic relationship with the unaccusative verb as direct objects have with transitive verbs; both are assigned the thematic role of theme. This is illustrated by the minimal pair in (2); the nominative noun phrase het glasthe glass in the unaccusative construction (2b) has the same relation to the verb as the accusative noun phrase het glas in the transitive construction in (2a). Therefore, it is generally assumed that the subject in (2b) originates in the regular direct object position, but is not assigned accusative case by the verb, so that it must be realized as a subject, for which reason we will call the subject of an unaccusative verb a theme-subject. The fact that (2b) has a transitive alternant is an accidental property of the verb brekento break. Some verbs, such as arriverento arrive, occur only in an unaccusative frame.

Hoekstra (1984a) has argued that regular intransitive and unaccusative verbs have three distinguishing properties: (a) intransitives take the perfect auxiliary hebbento have, whereas unaccusatives take the auxiliary zijnto be; (b) the past/passive participle of unaccusatives can be used attributively to modify a head noun that corresponds to the subject of the verbal construction, whereas this is not possible with intransitive verbs; (c) the impersonal passive is only possible with intransitive verbs. These properties are illustrated in (3) by the intransitive verb lachento laugh and the unaccusative arriverento arrive.

However, Mulder & Wehrmann (1989) argued that only a subset of unaccusative verbs exhibits all the properties in (3). For example, location verbs such as hangen in (4) enter into a similar alternation as the verb breken in (2), but nevertheless the verb in (4b) does not fully exhibit the behavior of the verb arriveren, as evidenced by the fact that it takes the auxiliary hebben in the perfect tense. Mulder & Wehrmann suggested that this is due to the fact that there is an aspectual difference between the verbs arriveren and hangen: the former is telic whereas the latter is not.

The examples in (5) show that we can make a similar distinction for dyadic verbs. A verb such as bevallento please in the (b)-examples behaves like an unaccusative verb in the sense that it selects the auxiliary zijn and cannot be passivized. Since in languages with morphological case the object would appear with dative case (cf. the German verb gefallento please), such verbs have become known as nominative-dative (nom-dat) verbs. A verb such as onderzoekento examine in the (a)-examples behaves like a traditional transitive verb in that it selects the auxiliary hebben and can be passivized, and in a language with morphological case the object would be given accusative case (cf. the German verb besuchento visit).

Since unaccusative verbs have a theme-subject, i.e. a subject that occupies an underlying VP-internal (“object”) position, we correctly predict that unaccusative triadic verbs do not exist. Consequently, if the distinction between verbs with an “underlying” subject and unaccusative verbs with a “derived” theme-subject is on the right track, we have to extend the traditional classification of verbs as in Figure 1. Sections 1.2 and 2.1 will argue that there are reasons to extend the classification in Figure 1 even further, but we will not discuss this here.

Section 2.2 discusses verbs with different types of predicative complements. Examples are the copulas, the verb vindento consider and a large set of verbs that can be combined with a resultative phrase.

We will also see that verbs entering the resultative construction can shift from one verb class to another by (apparently) changing their adicity, as in the (a)-examples in (7), where the intransitive verb lopen becomes transitive, or their selection properties, as in the (b)-examples.

Sections 2.3 and 2.4 discuss verbs that take a PP-complement, such as wachtento wait in (8a), and the somewhat more special cases, such as wegento weigh in (8b), that take an obligatory adjectival phrase. The discussion of complements in the form of a clause is postponed until Chapter 5.

Finally, Section 2.5 discusses a number of more special verb types, like inherently reflexive verbs and so-called psychological verbs, i.e. verbs with a subject or object that have the thematic role of experiencer instead of agent/theme.

The previous subsection has already shown that it is not always possible to say that a particular verb belongs categorically to a single class: examples (2) and (4), for instance, show that the verbs brekento break and hangento hang can be used as transitive as well as unaccusative verbs. And the examples in (7) show that the class of the verb can also depend on other elements in the clause. The phenomenon that verbs can be the head of more than one type of syntactic frame is known as verb-frame alternation and will be discussed in Chapter 3. Another well-known type of alternation, known as dative shift, is illustrated in (10).

We will take a broad view of the term verb-frame alternation and include voice alternations, such as the alternation between active and passive clauses in the (a)-examples in (11), as well as alternations that are the result of derivational morphology, such as the so-called locative alternation in the (b)-examples in (11), which is triggered by the affixation of the prefix be-.

In a sense, these chapters continue the discussion in Chapter 2 on argument structure by discussing cases where verbs take a verbal dependent, i.e. a clause or a smaller (extended) projection of another verb. The reason for not discussing this type of complementation in Chapter 2 is that it does not substantially alter the syntactic verb classification developed there: for example, many of the verbs that take an internal argument have the option of choosing between a nominal and a clausal complement. The reason for devoting a separate chapter to clausal/verbal arguments is that such arguments have many special properties and introduce a number of complicating factors that have been studied extensively in the literature. Even a brief discussion of these special properties and complicating factors would have seriously hampered the main line of argument in Chapter 2, and it is therefore better to discuss these properties in their own right.

This chapter discusses adverbial modification of clauses/verbal projections. We will begin by discussing the different semantic types of adverbial phrases: Section 8.1 will first discuss the basic distinction between adverbial phrases modifying the VP, like manner and certain spatiotemporal modifiers, and adverbial phrases modifying a larger part of the clause, like negation and modal modifiers. After this, Section 8.2 proposes a further subdivision of these two main classes. Section 8.3 discusses the categorial status of adverbial phrases and shows that there are often several possibilities: temporal modifiers, for example, can be APs (vroegearly), PPs (na de wedstrijdafter the game), NPs (de hele wedstrijdduring the whole game) and clauses (nadat Ajax verloren hadafter Ajax had lost the game). Section 8.4 concludes with word-order restrictions related to adverbial clauses. These word-order restrictions can be related to the semantic type of adverbial modifiers (e.g. clausal modifiers precede predicate modifiers in the middle field of the clause), but also to their categorial type (e.g. adverbial clauses tend to occur in extraposed position).

These chapters discuss the word order in the clause. Chapter 9 begins by providing a bird’s-eye view of the overall internal organization of the clause. It starts by characterizing the positions in which the verbs normally occur (the so-called second and clause-final position of the clause), and then defines three topological fields in the clause that often enter the description: clause-initial position, middle field, postverbal position. It will also introduce the main movement operations that can affect the word order in the clause: wh-movement, extraposition, various forms of scrambling, etc.

Note that readers unfamiliar with Dutch syntax may find it useful to read this chapter as a general introduction to Dutch syntax: it presents a number of issues that the reader will encounter throughout this work. Chapter 10 through Chapter 13 provide more detailed discussions of the various topics introduced in Chapter 9.

The three parts on noun phrases, adjective phrases, and adpositional phrases include separate chapters on the syntactic uses of these phrases, i.e. their use as arguments, modifiers and predicates. This may seem a bit odd in the case of verb phrases; the use of clauses as arguments and complementives is already discussed in Chapter 5, and their adverbial use is discussed in Section 8.3. Clauses can also be used as modifiers of nouns, but these relative clauses are discussed in detail in Section N16.3. Furthermore, the attributive and predicative use of past/passive participles and so-called modal infinitives is discussed in detail in Section A31. In short, since a separate discussion of the syntactic uses of verb phrases would simply lead to unnecessary redundancy, we do not include this discussion here, but simply refer the reader to the above-mentioned sections for relevant discussion.

References

Burzio, Luigi. 1981. Intransitive verbs and Italian auxiliaries. MIT: PhD thesis.

Burzio, Luigi. 1986. Italian syntax: a government-binding approach. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Haeseryn, Walter et al. 1997. Algemene Nederlandse spraakkunst, 2nd, revised edition. Groningen: Nijhoff.

Hoekstra, Teun. 1984a. Transitivity. Grammatical relations in government-binding theory. Dordrecht/Cinnaminson: Foris Publications.

Mulder, René & Pim Wehrmann. 1989. Locational verbs as unaccusatives. In Linguistics in the Netherlands1989, eds. Hans Bennis and Ans Van Kemenade, 111-122. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

Perlmutter, David M. 1978. Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 4: 157-189.