The properties of anticausatives crosslinguistically

Abstract

GoalsThe 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 1 Versions of this paper were presented at the XXXI Incontro di Grammatica Generativa in Rome (February 2005), at the 28th GLOW Colloquium in Geneva (April 2005), at the Linguistics Seminar at the University of Venice (May 2005), at the CGSW 20 at the University of Tilburg (June 2005) and at the 36th NELS conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (October 2005). We would like to thank these audiences and an anonymous reviewer for comments and discussion.

Statives and nominalization1

“…In Greek, these are ambiguous between an eventive reading, which is necessarily agentive (see Anagnostopoulou 1999), and a causative reading, which several researchers classify as stative aspectually (see Arad 1998, Landau 2010 The stative reading holds as long as the perception trigger is exposed to the experiencer (Arad 1998 What corresponds to the causer of the transitive verb surfaces in a PP, often distinct from the one found with Greek anticausatives/passives (ja 'for' (24b) vs. apo 'from'/me 'with' in anticausatives/passives), but sometimes similar to that, (24a). This morphological pattern is generally found with the anticausative alternation, where two types of anticausative verbs can also be identiied, one bearing active morphology, and one bearing non-active morphology (see Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2006 for details). I take it thus that the verbs in (24) are unaccusatives 5 .…”

“…of little v heads (see Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2006, Ramchand 2008. In other words, what are the building blocks of stative verbs?…”

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

“…This contrasts with the properties of transitive verbs derived from the same root. However, the difference relates to the presence of agentive features only in the former case (Alexiadou et al 2006). This similarity is reflected by the empirical fact that there are languages where the passive marker can function as the non-causative marker as well.…”

“…1 Its aim is to present new empirical data and to propose a syntactic analysis of the alternation couched in the framework of Distributed Morphology (see Marantz 1984;1997, andArad 2005). I will claim that the transitive/intransitive verbs taking part in the alternation are not derived from each other, but they are both formed from roots, in the sense of Alexiadou et al (2006).…”

Ulwa Verb Class Morphology

“…28 See Alexiadou et al (2006) for a good overview of data from several Indo-European languages. DeLancey (1984) discusses the same kind of data not only in English but in Hare (Athabaskan) and Newari (Tibeto-Burman) as well.…”