We discuss conceptual and empirical arguments from Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages against an analysis treating anticausative verbs as derived from their lexical causative counterparts under reflexivization. Instead, we defend the standard account to the semantics of the causative alternation according to which anticausatives in general, and anticausatives marked with reflexive morphology in particular, denote simple one-place inchoative events that are logically entailed by their lexical causative counterparts. Under such an account, anticausative verbs are weak scalar expressions that stand in a semantico-pragmatic opposition to their strong lexical causative counterparts. Due to this scalar relation, the use of an anticausative can trigger the implicature that the use of its lexical causative counterpart is too strong. As usual with implicatures, they can be 'metalinguistically' denied, cancelled, or reinforced and we argue that these mechanisms explain all central empirical facts brought up in the literature in favor of a treatment of anticausatives as semantically reflexive predicates. Our results reinforce the view that the reflexive morphemes used in many (Indo-European) languages to mark anticausatives do not necessarily trigger reflexive semantics. However, we also show that a string involving a reflexively marked (anti-)causative verb can be forced into a semantically reflexive construal under particular conceptual or grammatical circumstances.
Dado que tanto los predicados complejos como los verbos de reestructuración conforman clases heterogéneas —dentro de una sola lengua y también a nivel tipológico—, resulta necesario estudiar cada caso en detalle. Así, este trabajo se centra en las causativas analíticas con hacer del español, ofreciendo un pormenorizado panorama general de sus propiedades que permitirá esclarecer algunos de los puntos más controvertidos para su análisis, como el tamaño del infinitivo y la posición del causee. Concretamente, se argumentará que el causee se encuentra en un SVoz y que, por lo tanto, el infinitivo no proyecta un SV escueto, sino que cuenta con una estructura funcional que incluye SVoz, SModalidad deóntica y SAsp.
We discuss the recent proposal by Koontz-Garboden (2009) (cf. also Chierchia 2004) that reflexively marked anticausative verbs (in Romance languages and beyond) are semantically reflexive. This proposal predicts that a sentence headed by a lexical causative verb should not entail the sentence headed by the reflexively marked anticausative counterpart. We uncover problems with the main argument for this claim and add further tests which show that a causative sentence does, in fact, entail its anticausative counterpart, whether reflexively marked or not. Our findings support standard semantics of the causative alternation according to which anticausatives, whether reflexively marked or not, denote inchoative oneplace predicates. They also reconfirm that the relevant reflexive morphology is syncretic and does not necessarily derive reflexive semantics.
Este artículo trata de esclarecer aspectos clave de la semántica y la sintaxis de la construcción <poner algo ~ a alguien a + infinitivo>, muy poco estudiada en la gramática del español. Se argumentará que la preposición a desempeña un papel crucial en su semántica causativa y en sus restricciones aspectuales (incoatividad), y se propondrá, además, un análisis sintáctico que permita explicar sus propiedades híbridas, entre el control y la reestructuración.
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