A Preliminary Note on the Causer/Affectee Ambiguity

This paper discusses the sentential subjects that can be interpreted either as Causer or as Affectee and argues for the existence of lexical causative verbs that check accusative Case without assigning an external theta-role. Hence, it presents a challenge to Burzio's generalization (Burzio (1986)). Moreover, it suggests, by analogy to direct causation, that the notion of direct affectedness should require the subject NP to possess the object NP in the Affectee interpretation. Japanese data are mainly discussed with frequent reference to English. This work is based on the Principles-and-Parameters framework (Chomsky (1995))