Chapter 7 is about transitive and intransitive verbs and the syntactic structures they can appear in. Transitive verbs can appear in the passive voice while intransitive verbs are ungrammatical in passive sentences. There are different types of passive structures in Japanese and Korean, and learners of English have difficulty identifying which verbs can be passivized in English. Intransitive verbs are divided into two classes according to their meaning: Agentive verbs are unergative verbs, and non-agentive verbs are unaccusative verbs. In Spanish, some unaccusative verbs appear with the reflexive pronoun se. This chapter presents the learnability problem that different types of transtive and intransitive verbs present for second language learners of English and of Spanish and discusses intervention research conducted in this area. The first part focuses on the passive voice. The second part is about unaccusative verbs, which second language learners sometimes erroneously use in the passive voice.

This chapter provides a critical survey of some of the most significant phenomena that show how the study of Romance languages can make a strong contribution to our current theoretical understanding of the principles and empirical generalizations relevant to argument structure and its realization. After defining the notion of argument structure, two different current theoretical approaches to the lexicon–syntax interface are briefly presented: the projectionist one, which is typically adopted in lexicalist frameworks, and the constructivist/neo-constructionist one, which is assumed in non-lexicalist frameworks. The selection of empirical phenomena made in this chapter includes a discussion of the well-known distinction among intransitive verbal predicates (unaccusatives vs unergatives) in the context of Romance linguistics, a review of the crucial role of the Romance clitic se in argument structure and argument realization, a survey of some relevant explorations of events of transferal based on the grammar of dative clitics as well as other aspects of dative-marked arguments in Romance languages, and, finally, a discussion of the prominent place that these languages occupy in the huge literature on Talmy’s lexicalization patterns together with an overview of several refinements made to his initial typology of motion events.