A Note on the There-Construction Verbs

Arguing against Burzio's (1986) and Levin and Rappaport Hovav's (1995) proposal that verbs that occur in the there-construction are unaccusative ones, Takami and Kuno (2000) point out counter-examples to their proposal and put forth a functional characterization of the class. This paper proposes that the class of there-construction verbs can be characterized in terms of the concept of unaccusativity, where verbs can be determined to be unaccusative depending on their contexts. More specifically, it proposes that only such verbs can be there-construction verbs as are unaccusative in a restrictive approach to argument structure as in Hale and Keyser (1993a).