This section discusses in more detail the classification of verbs with nominal arguments proposed in Section 1.2.2, sub II, and repeated here as Table 1. This classification extends the traditional classification, which is based solely on the number of nominal arguments selected by the individual verbs, by appealing also to the distinction between internal and external arguments.

The classification in Table 1 makes it impossible to adopt the postulate of traditional grammar that there is a one-to-one mapping between the adicity of verbs and verb type, as shown in (8). In fact, it is even unclear whether the monadic verbs in (8b) and the dyadic verbs in (8c) form natural classes. The intransitive and unaccusative verbs in (8b), for example, do not seem to have much more in common than that they take a single nominal argument which appears as the nominative subject of the construction, and we will see later that they have quite different syntactic properties. Essentially the same applies to the dyadic verbs in (8c).

At this point, some brief remarks on terminology may be in order. Some readers may prefer the term unergative verb rather than intransitive verb as opposed to unaccusative verb; our use of intransitive is motivated by the fact that the term unergative verb is quite alien in the context of Germanic languages and, perhaps more importantly, by the desire to express that intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive form a natural class in the sense that they all take an external argument. The name Nom-dat verb is based on the fact that the object in construction with these verbs is given dative case in German (Lenerz 1977 and Den Besten 1985), but an alternative and perhaps more meaningful name would be dyadic unaccusative verb. The term undative verb is coined in analogy to the term unaccusative verb to express that these verbs are incapable of assigning dative case, as a result of which a nominal argument with a goal, recipient, or experiencer role cannot be realized as a dative object, but must appear as a nominative subject.

The following subsections will show that the classification in Table 1 is more revealing than the traditional one in (8) in terms of adicity. The discussion is organized as follows. Section 2.1.1 is a brief discussion of impersonal verbs. Section 2.1.2 continues by looking at the intransitive, transitive, and monadic unaccusative verbs; much attention is paid to distinguishing the intransitive from the unaccusative verbs. Section 2.1.3 continues with the ditransitive and dyadic unaccusative (nom-dat) verbs. The discussion of nominal arguments is concluded in Section 2.1.4 with a close look at the undative verbs, i.e. verbs with a derived subject corresponding to the goal argument (indirect object) of a ditransitive verb.