ISSN: 1139-8736
Depósito Legal: B-48039-2000

6.2.2. The Intransitive Motion Construction

To account for intransitive sentences expressing motion, Goldberg postulates the existence of an intransitive motion construction. This construction deals with sentences such as:

(6.130) The bottle floated into the cave.
In this sentence, no external cause for the movement is presented.

Goldberg simply mentions this construction without analyzing it in any detail. She simply states that the intransitive motion construction is related to the caused-motion construction via a subpart inheritance link. This implies that it is a subpart of the caused motion construction. Structurally, it can be defined as [SUBJ [V OBL]], and semantically the subject, the object that moves, is a theme argument and the oblique is a directional. It is, therefore, exactly like the caused motion construction, except that the external cause of the movement is not present.

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ISSN: 1139-8736
Depósito Legal: B-48039-2000