Causation and stative verbs in English.

Main author: Williams, H. P.
Format: Theses           
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Summary: The purpose of this paper is to examine some stative verbs, i.e. verbs which do not normally take progressive aspect, from a syntactic and a philosophical point of view. An examination of the concept of causation and its relation to transitivity is also undertaken in order to try and show that stative verbs are "resultatives," Formulation of the argument leads to the positing of a linguistic model that is an extension though in some ways a fundamental alteration of Fillmore's case model. This model allows room for the philosophic insights of Austin & Urmson.