Abstract
Since the introduction of the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter, 1978), there\r have been many further attempts to explain the mechanisms behind the division\r in intransitive verbs. This paper aims to analyze and test some of theories of unaccusativity\r using computational linguistic tools. Speci cally, I focus on verbs that\r exhibit split intransitivity, that is, verbs that can appear in both unaccusative and\r unergative constructions, and in determining the distinguishing features that make\r this alternation possible. Many formal linguistic theories of unaccusativity involve\r the interplay of semantic roles and temporal event markers, both of which can be\r analyzed using statistical computational linguistic tools, including semantic role\r labelers, semantic parses, and automatic event classi cation. I use auxiliary verb\r selection as a surface-level indicator of unaccusativity in Italian and Dutch, and\r iii\r test various classes of verbs extracted from the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005).\r Additionally, I provide some historical background for the evolution of this distinction,\r and analyze how my results t into the larger theoretical framework.