Unaccusatives and unergatives: Evidence from Croatian

We argue that the unaccusativity phenomenon occurs in Croatian, as in many other languages. We demonstrate that unaccusative predicates not only have to meet specific (morpho) syntactic diagnostic criteria, but also that semantic criteria are involved. We show that it is possible to characterize Croatian intransitive verbs as unaccusatives using the following diagnostics: 1. past participle derivation by suffixation of -l; 2. participial adjective formation; 3. -ac (-er) nominals; 4. prefixation by the preverbs po-, do- and u-; 5. the perfective aspect; 6. resultative constructions; and 7. the possessive dative. In order to demonstrate a number of relevant semantic diagnostics, three classes of verbs are isolated, defined in terms of their lexical semantic representation and their morphosyntactic configuration: verbs of change of state, verbs of appearance and verbs of inherently directed motion.