Posterior Elements of an English Intransitive Verb: A Study of the Verb LIVE

Abstract

This study intends to delineate the types of posterior elements of the intransitive, specifically unergative, verb live and examine the respective functions of each type. The research data was elicited from the free online, searchable Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and there were 1,200 sentence instances containing four equally apportioned inflected forms of the lemma live (live, lives, lived, and living). All posterior elements of the unergative live are of two broad types: live with posterior elements and with zero posterior elements. Results of the study have shown that live comes in company substantially more with posterior elements than without ones (98.25% and 1.75%, respectively), and adverbials are the most frequently found types of all postverbal elements found (95.08%). This study found that the co-occurring patterns of the intransitive live and its posterior elements can be justified on semantic as well as pragmatic grounds.