Definition of "unaccusative"

unaccusative

/ˌʌnəˈkjuːzətɪv/

adjective
not comparable
1. (linguistics, of a verb) Intransitive and having an experiencer as its subject, that is, the (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent.
  Quotations
  The light-verb analysis sketched here also offers us a way of accounting for the fact that in Early Modern English, the perfect auxiliary used with unaccusative verbs was be (as we saw in §7.6), whereas that used with transitive and unergative verbs was have.
  2004, Andrew Radford, Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English, University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, §9.6, page 352
noun
plural unaccusatives
1. (linguistics) An unaccusative verb.
  Quotations
  We have seen that Unergatives and Unaccusatives differ in 1) permitting the derivation of an Impersonal Passive, and 2) in licensing purpose clauses, since Unergatives have active subjects, and Unaccusatives do not.
  1998, Eloise Jelinek, “The Projection of Arguments”, in Miriam Butt, Wilhelm Geuder, editors, Voice and Transitivity as Functional Projections in Yaqui