A unified treatment of the exceptions to the Agent/ECM Correlation

Abstract

Based on the contrast between the believe-class and the wager-class verbs, Pesetsky (1992) makes a generalization that agentive verbs do not allow ECM (the Agent/ECM Correlation). However, he notes two classes of exceptions to the generalization. I argue that the two classes of exceptions can be uniformly treated as causatives and that the Agent/ECM Correlation can be seen as an instance of the broader l-syntax finding that – not all internal arguments are created equal – with agentive activity verbs the root selects an internal argument, but not with change-of-state verbs (Basilico 1998, Hale and Keyser 2002, Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011, Cuervo 2014).