Acceso usuarios
Machteld Meulleman, Nathalie Stockman
It is widely assumed that meteorological verbs can be considered as unaccusative across the board. This study re-examines this assumption through an empirical analysis of the semantico-syntactic behaviour of the Spanish llover and amanecer. Although our data reveal that both meteorological verbs cover a wide variety of syntactic constructions, we establish that they indeed fundamentally behave as unaccusative verbs. However, llover functions basically as a verb of change of location, while amanecer can be categorized as a verb of appearance. We argue that this semantic difference between both types of unaccusative verbs accounts for the different constructions in which they appear: llover sometimes has an unergative or transitive use, while amanecer often functions as a copulative verb.
