Cross-linguistic sources of anticausative markers

Submitted to a thematic volume in Linguistics, entitled Typology of Labile Verbs, ed. by Leonid Kulikov & Nikolaos Lavidas, 2010

The historical development of valence changes of verbs is generally an understudied phenomenon, and changes in lability of argument structure of verbs over time is even less studied. The aim of the present article is to contribute to a commencing discussion of the evolutionary paths of anticausativization in general and P-lability in particular. This is motivated by the fact that various genetically related languages, like the ancient and early Indo-European languages, have developed partly the same and partly ...

Linguistics, 2015

The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb’s meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.

During the last 40 years research of causativity belonged to the central themes of the general and comparative or better typological linguistics. In this respect it is astonishing that in my opinion from the Slavic side this subject was treated if at all very marginally in the past. My interest was motivated by the fact that CC requires an analysis, which touches an interface of morphology, semantics, lexicon and syntax. Therefore it is also easy to grasp by the Minimalistic Program (with the inclusion of Distributive Morphology). Furthermore, the theme comprises important observations concerning questions of diathesis and passive which moti- vated me to choose it for the present volume. In this article the features of externally and internally caused verbs will be described and put into context of the phenomenon of unaccusa- tivity. My approach will be the following: I will try to characterize the relationship between lexicon and syntax, namely including the concepts of Distributive Morphology and of ROOT-Semantics of verbs, which participate or rather, do not participate in Causative Alternation and unaccusativity. The Causative Alternation (CAL) will serve as criteria to distin- guish between externally and internally caused causation; with help of the CAL the unaccusative Verbs will be divided into two sub- groups: alternating unaccusative (AU-) verbs and non-alternating unaccusative (NAU-) verbs. In the following an alternate distinction between AU- and NAU-verbs will be developed, namely the pre- sence/absence of information about how the process to be treated was caused. The universal concept of the encyclopedic lexicon in the English, German and Czech language seems to assume four different ROOTS of verbs at base to classify the Anti-Causativity-Opposition: √agen- tive (murder, assasinate, cut), √internally caused (blossom, wilt, grow), √externally caused (destroy, kill, slay) and √cause unspecified (break, open, melt). Moreover, it will be shown that unergative/causative pairs depict an independent phenomenon which does not affect considerations about CAL (correspondent to Alexiadou et al. 2006a, b and Marantz 1997, but dissenting Levin − Rappaport Hovav 1995 and Reinhart 2000). In 6 and 7 I will provide an exact analysis of the roots (ROOTS) and the syntactic projections which derive from them.

In M. Cennamo & C. Fabrizio (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2015, Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015. Amsterdam: John Benjamins., 2019

Antipassive constructions may be polysemous, with aspectual and modal functions other than patient demotion, and may differ with respect to the way agents and patients are coded. This paper explores the hypothesis that at least some of these differences can be explained by taking into account the diachronic sources of these constructions, which hold the key to some regularities. The sample includes the 48 languages with an antipassive in the WALS (Polinsky 2013) + 50 languages in which an antipassive or a functionally equivalent construction is attested. These functionally equivalent constructions are generally not labelled as antipassives in grammatical descriptions, and alternative labels such as depatientive, deobjective, unspecified object construction, etc. are used. The diachronic sources of all these constructions are identified drawing on two kinds of evidence: (i) etymological reconstructions based on the comparative method; (ii) synchronic resemblance between (some features of) the source construction and (some features of) the target construction. Four main sources are found to be recurrent in the sample: (i) agent nominalizations; (ii) generic/indefinite elements filling the object position (e.g. person for animate objects, (some)thing for inanimate objects); (iii) action nominalizations, either alone or accompanied by a light verb like ‘do’ ( do the washing); (iv) morphemes encoding reflexive and/or reciprocal actions. For each of these sources, a diachronic scenario is sketched through which the antipassive construction might have developed out of the source.

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

In this paper we will discuss cross-linguistic variation in semantic entailment patterns in causative alternations. Previous work has probed this issue with data from elicited semantic judgements on paired linguistic forms, often involving linguistic negation and contradiction. We contribute to the debate in the form of a related psycholinguistic experiment that taps into direct judgements of truth conditions based on visualized scenarios. The stimulus consisted of video sequences of agents causing events, and the task involved answering a Yes-No question based on the anticausative/inchoative alternant. We were therefore able to test two languages, Norwegian and English, with the very same stimuli and directly compare the judgements. Based on our results, we will argue that the causative alternation is qualitatively different in the two languages. More specifically, the results support an entailment relation between the causative and its anticausative counterpart in English, as predicted by the whole class of "causer-less" analyses in the literature. In contrast to this, our results support a reflexive analysis of anticausatives in Norwegian , where no such entailment holds.

Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 2012

The causative alternation has been recognised in the linguistic literature as one of the most widely spread linguistic phenomena, attested in almost all languages, although differently realised and involving partially different sets of verbs. In this paper, we identify the degree of spontaneity of the event described by a verb as a general component of meaning of alternating verbs which underlies the within-language and cross-linguistic variation in their realisations. We first establish that a corpus-based measure of this property, the ratio of the frequency of usage of the causative and anticausative form, is strongly correlated to an independent typological measure (Haspelmath, 1993). Then we examine the influence of this property on the cross-linguistic realisations of verbs. We find that the degree of variation and parallelism in forms across languages is strongly related to the degree of spontaneity of the verb.

2015

Anticausativization is a morphological process where a certain morphological marking incurs the suppression of the causing event and of the external argument. Koontz-Garboden (2009) advocated an analysis where the semantic operation responsible for anticausativization is reflexivization,i.e.,co-indexing of external and internal arguments. He argues that this analysis is applicable to anticausativization“in general,”i.e.,not only to anticausativization with reflexive morphemes but also to anticausativizaiton employing other types of morpheme as a marker of anticausativization. This paper examines the viability of this universal characterization,using the data from the Hokkaido dialect of Japanese.

uni-potsdam.de

The aims of this paper are twofold. The first objective is to check whether Polish anticausatives are causative in their lexical semantic or syntactic representation. Four diagnostics supporting the presence of a cause in anticausatives are examined against the Polish data, including cause PPs, modification by by itself, the interpretation of negation, and the occurrence of dative causes. Evidence is provided that none of these diagnostics proves the presence of a cause in syntax or semantics of Polish anticausatives. The causative meaning of anticausatives comes from the complex event structure built in the syntax, but interpreted as causative at the syntax-semantics interface. The paper also aims to offer a syntactic analysis of Polish anticausatives in the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (2000, et seq.). The validity of three approaches to the structure of anticausatives is tested against the Polish data, including the unaccusative analysis of Schäfer (2008), the reflexive account of Koontz-Garboden (2009) and Cuervo (2014, 2015), and the predication-based approach of Den Dikken and Dekány (2019). Schäfer's (2008) analysis seems to best fit the Polish data, since Polish anticausatives are unaccusative and contain a reflexive marker, equipped with w-features, but lacking a theta role, hence functioning as an A-expletive.

2013

This study investigates the applicability and suitability of the syntactic decomposition approach to account for the causative and anticausative alternation in Kikongo (Kizombo) in terms of the structural nodes of Voice, vCAUS and Root as posited in this approach to (anti-)causativity (see Alexiadou 2010). In addition, the aspectual approach postulated by Vendler (1957) and further developed by Verkuyl (1972) and Smith (1997) is invoked for the reason that the two alternants in the causative and anticausative alternation in Kikongo (Kizombo) are associated with aspectual verb class differences. Research on the causative and anticausative alternation has long been the focus of extensive work in typological and theoretical linguistics. Two central issues revolve around the debate: first the properties of meaning that determine the alternation and the derivational relationship between the alternants, and second, the relation between the causative alternation and other transitivity alternations, e.g. passives and middles. This dissertation demonstrates that there is a wide range of acceptability judgments associated with anticausative uses of Kizombo in externally and internally caused change of state and change of location/position verbs. The verb root is the element of meaning that allows the Kizombo verbs to alternate irrespective of their verb classes, including agentive verb roots. All the causative variants of externally caused verbs are morphologically unmarked, but all the anticausative variants are morphologically marked. However, all the internally caused change of state verbs are morphologically unmarked. Both the causative and anticausative variants of change of location/position verbs are morphologically unmarked. The anticausative and passive sentences can license an external causer through an implicit argument. While the passive verb sentences can be modified by by-agent, purpose clause and agent-oriented phrases, the anticausative sentences can be modified by instrument, natural force, agent-oriented and by-self phrases. The acceptability of modifiers with anticausatives and passives presupposes a presence of a causer in both constructions. The causative form of change of location/position verbs is syntactically intransitive (i.e. in the locative-subject alternation), but its anticausative variant acquires a transitive-like form. Thus, the concept of causative is related to cause and effect of the argument participating in the process. The study considers competing approaches concerning the derivational direction of the causative and anticausative alternation. Given the data in Kizombo, it is argued that the syntactic decomposition approach is the most appropriate to account for the example sentences in the causative and anticausative constructions. The transitive approach could probably deal with the externally caused change of state verbs, as discussed in chapter 6, but would face a Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za iii challenge relating to the change of location/position verbs because none of the variants is morphologically marked.

Lingua, 2011

Lingua, 1994

This paper investigates the phenomena that come under the label 'causative alternation' in English, as illustrated in the transitive and intransitive sentence pair Antonia broke the vase / The vase broke. Central to our analysis is a distinction between verbs which are inherently monadic and verbs which are inherently dyadic. Given this distinction, much of the relevant data is explained by distinguishing two processes that give rise to causative alternation verbs. The first, and by far more pervasive process, forms lexical detransitive verbs from certain transitive verbs with a causative meaning. The second process, which is more restricted in its scope, results in the existence of causative transitive verbs related to some intransitive verbs. Finally, this study provides further insight into the semantic underpinnings of the Unaccusativity Hypothesis

Linguistics, 2018

This corpus-driven computational study addresses the question of why some verbs in some languages participate in the causative alternation while their counterparts in other languages do not. The results of this study suggest that the lexical property that underlies this variation is the probability of external causation. Alternating verbs are distributed on a scale of increasing probability for an external causer to occur. The probability of external causation can be empirically assessed in two ways, among others: first, by observing the typological distribution of causative and anticausative morphological markings across a wide range of languages; second, through the frequency distribution of causative and anticausative uses of the alternating verbs in a corpus of a single language. Our study reveals that these two measures are correlated. Moreover, we demonstrate that the corpus-based measure is applicable to a wide range of verbs. Extending the corpus-based investigation comparat...

Heidinger, Steffen. 2010. French anticausatives: A diachronic perspective. Berlin: de Gruyter., 2010

French anticausatives, emphasizing the relation between the two formal types of anticausative verbs in French, the reflexive and the unmarked anticausative (La branche s'est cassée

Other children, other languages: issues in the theory of …, 1994

A Crosslinguistic Approach to the Causative Alternation One of the bedrocks of current linguistic investigation is that there is a fairly direct mapping between thought and language. The assumption is that at some level of the grammar, whether it is d-structure (Chomsky 1981), argument structure (Grimshaw 1990) or lexical conceptual structure (Hale & Keyser 1986), there is a tie between language structure and a more universal cognitive perception of events. Perlmutter & Postal's (1984) Universal Alignment Hypothesis (UAH) and Baker's (1988) Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) are concrete expressions of this assumption. These hypotheses, with Chomsky's (1981) Projection Principle (or it's extended variants) impose meaningful constraints on verb argument structures. A universal or uniform association of thematic roles to syntactic positions would eliminate crosslinguistic variation in verb argument structures. Ideally, children would be able to use such principles in constructing their initial lexical entries for verbs and so avoid confusion from hearing well-formed sentences with null arguments or ill-formed sentences with missing arguments. On hearing a sentence such as 'The stick broke,' the UAH or UTAH would tell a child that the NP 'the stick' was in the direct object position at some level of the syntactic derivation since it bears the thematic role of theme. The linguistic principles in combination with the primary linguistic data would provide the child with all 'I see you.' 'You are going.' b. k-0-a-kuwi:-j d. k-0-taq'en-ik INCOMP-3A-2E-hurry-TV INCOMP-3A-PROGRESSIVE-IV 'You are hurrying.' 'It is-ing 2 .' K'iche' uses the suffix /-isa/ to derive the causative form of intransitive verbs. Examples of this causative construction are shown in (2). In K'iche' the causative suffix can only be added to intransitive verb stems, unlike Berber, Japanese and Korean where it is also possible to add a causative affix to transitive verb stems. (2) K'iche' causative verbs with /-isa/ Intransitive Form Causative Form a. k-0-poqow-ik k-0-a-poqow-isa:-j INCOMP-3A-boil-IV INCOMP-3A-2E-boil-CAUSE-TV 'I am coming.' 'I will make you come.' b. kin -muxan-ik k-0-in-b'an k-at-muxan-ik INCOMP-1A-swim-IV INCOMP-3A-1E-do INCOMP-2A-swim-IV 'I am swimming.' 'I will make you swim.' The K'iche' causative alternation is further complicated by one additional factor. Transitive verbs may lose the direct object with the addition of an absolutive antipassive affix. K'iche' speakers use the absolutive antipassive to emphasize an