Word.ws English Dictionary

unaccusative

UK/ˌʌnəˈkjuːzətɪv/

unaccusative adjective: intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent.

Adjective

unaccusative (not comparable)

  1. Intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent.
    • The light-verb analysis sketched here also offers us a way of accounting for the fact that in Early Modern English, the perfect auxiliary used with unaccusative verbs was be (as we saw in §7.6), whereas that used with transitive and unergative verbs was have.2004, Andrew Radford, Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English, University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, →ISBN, →OCLC, §9.6, page 352

Noun

unaccusative (plural unaccusatives)

  1. An unaccusative verb.
    • We have seen that Unergatives and Unaccusatives differ in 1) permitting the derivation of an Impersonal Passive, and 2) in licensing purpose clauses, since Unergatives have active subjects, and Unaccusatives do not.1998, Eloise Jelinek, “The Projection of Arguments”, in Miriam Butt, Wilhelm Geuder, editors, Voice and Transitivity as Functional Projections in Yaqui

Antonyms of unaccusative

Forms of unaccusative

pluralunaccusatives

Origin of unaccusative

From un- + accusative, from the fact that in a nominative-accusative language, the accusative case, which marks the direct object of a transitive verb, typically marks the non-volitional role. In unaccusative verbs, the non-volitional arguments do not take the accusative case.

Words formed from unaccusative

Questions about unaccusative

What does unaccusative mean?
Unaccusative means intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent.
What part of speech is unaccusative?
Unaccusative can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce unaccusative?
Unaccusative is pronounced /ˌʌnəˈkjuːzətɪv/ (UK).

Words near unaccusative in the dictionary

  1. unaccurately
  2. unaccurateness
  3. unaccursed
  4. unaccusable
  5. unaccusably
  6. unaccusative
  7. unaccusatively
  8. unaccusatives
  9. unaccusativity
  10. unaccusatory
  11. unaccused

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unaccusative (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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