Issues with the Unergative/Unaccusative Classification of the Intransitive Verbs

Abstract

The paper abandons a strict two-way sub-classification of intransitive verbs into unaccuasative and unergative for Hindi and proposes a distribution plotting of the same in a diffusion chart. The diagnostics tests that Bhatt (2003) applied on Hindi data are ranked for their efficiency of attributing correct sub-class to verbs. The diffusion chart shows that a tripartite classification handles the issue of classification of intransitive verbs in a better manner than the classical binary approach. The tripartite classification is as follows: (1) Verbs that take animate subject and are compatible with adverb of volitionality; (2) Verbs that take animate subject but are not compatible with adverb of volitionality; and (3) Verbs that take inanimate subject. The classification is of immense advantage for various NLP tasks such as machine translation, natural language generation.