A corpus-based study on the transitive uses of English physiological verbs

This paper examines the transitivity potential of a group of English unergative verbs that denote physiological processes, a syntactico-semantic verbal class which has not received enough attention in the literature. Through a qualitative and quantitative corpus-based analysis of 24 verbs conducted on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), it will be shown that the syntactic flexibility of this verbal class is higher than stated in previous studies since, in addition to the cognate object construction (Burp the same garlic burps), the substance object construction (Breathe the smoke, Lucien), and the resultative construction (He yawned open his mouth), these verbs have been documented in seven other transitive patterns in which they increase their valency with the addition of a non-canonical direct object: x’s way constructions (I sweated my way through a painful run), reaction object constructions (Emma hiccups a yes), caused-motion constructions (She spits phlegm into a Kleenex), the preposition drop object alternation (He shit the rug), the understood body-part object alternation (The elk snuffled her face through the snow), away constructions (Everyone laughs the evening away), and causative constructions (Let’s burp this baby!).