Ergative diagnostics: temptatio redux

In the past 20 years, a new class of verbs has seen the light of existence: 'unaccu- sative' or 'ergative' verbs. These verbs are intransitive, but different from the tra- ditional notion of intransitive to the extent that their subject valency behaves like a direct object distributionally. Ever since the introduction of this new gram- matical notion in (typologically non-ergative, i. e., accusative) languages like English a vast bulk of literature on this topic has come forth. The present article takes issue with this mainly Anglophil notion of unaccusativity/ergativity. The claim is that this notion does not make sense in languages which provide aspec- tual or aktionsart distinctions of perfectivity. 'Unaccusatives' are intransitive per- fectives. This argument is carried through primarily on the empirical basis of German.