The properties of anticausatives crosslinguistically

The causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly "cause to Vintransitive" (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar. Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative / anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative / anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS component. Crosslinguistic variation in passives and anticausatives depends on properties of Voice and its combinations with CAUS and various types of roots

Towards an analysis of the causative/non-causative alternation in Udmurt

The paper studies the causative/non-causative alternation in Udmurt. I propose an analysis based on Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1984; 1997): I suggest that the causative and non-causative variants of the alternation in Udmurt are derived from roots and not from each other. The difference in the argument structure of the variants is due to the fact that as with verbs marked with the productive causative morpheme, the structure of causative verbs also always contains a Cause head (in the sense of Pylkkänen 2002; 2008). Non-causative verbs, on the other hand, have only a Voice head (in the sense of Kratzer 1996)

What Causes the Alternation of Agentive Verbs in Brazilian Portuguese?

It has been noted that agentive verbs, i.e. verbs that would not be expected to undergo the causative alternation, according to Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995), participate in a causative-like alternation in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). I call this alternation ‘the agentive alternation’ (AA). In this paper, I argue that the AA is a byproduct of the loss of the clitic se that occupies the position of an external argument in VoiceP (Schäfer 2008). I show that the AA alternation is different from the causative alternation and the verbs that participate in the AA share characteristics with BP unmarked generic middles. Importantly, in spite of the loss of voice morphology, BP unmarked middles project unnacusative syntax. As a result, there is no difference between middles and anticausatives in BP in respect to their transitivity status and verbs previously only licensed in middles were generalized as alternating verbs

The acquisition of the English causative-inchoative alternation by Arabic native speakers

This study is an investigation of Arabic native speakers’(ANSs) acquisition of the English causative-inchoative alternation (eg Tom broke the vase vs. The vase broke). Emphasis is placed on the relationship between English proficiency, language transfer, and Universal Grammar mechanisms in ANSs’ interlanguage representations. Four central research questions guide the study:(1) Does the English causative-inchoative alternation pose a learnability problem for ANSs?(2) Do ANSs distinguish between unaccusative and unergative verbs in English?(3) Are there L1 transfer effects on ANSs’ acquisition of the English causative-inchoative alternation?(4) Are there differences across English proficiency levels with respect to the answers to questions 1–3? To address these questions, an acceptability judgment and correction task was administered to a total of 119 ANSs (from the Gaza Strip, Palestine) of different

Verb derivation in modern Greek inside alternation classes

In this paper I present five alternations of the verb system of Modern Greek, which are recurrently mapped on the syntactic frame NPi__NP. The actual claim is that only the participation in alternations and/or the allocation to an alternation variant can reliably determine the relation between a verb derivative and its base. In the second part, the conceptual structures and semantic/situational fields of a large number of “-ízo” derivatives appearing inside alternation classes are presented. The restricted character of the conceptual and situational preferences inside alternations classes suggests the dominant character of the alternations component

Italian causatives and the grammar of (in)direct causation

This paper tackles the issue of the relation between syntax and semantics in causative structures, and it concentrates on the empirical case offered by syntactic causative constructions in Italian. Italian exhibit two types of causative constructions (so-called faire-par and faire-infinitive constructions) that have been the subject of extensive inquiry in the literature. I argue that, in order to capture the semantic similarities and differences between the two types of syntactic causatives in Italian, it is necessary to relate their properties to the underlying causative structure that they express. This approach leads to the rejection of previous accounts that distinguish the two structural types based on the selectional properties of the first causative verb. An account in terms of Voice alternation is retained, and I present new empirical evidence for this approach, drawn from comparison with other causative constructions in Italian and from the discussion of the transitive/anticausative alternation in the infinitive clause