A unified analysis of passives and anticausatives

  • Starting from the basic observation that, across languages, the anticausative variant of an alternating verb systematically involves morphological marking that is shared by passive verbs, the goal of this paper is to provide a uniform and formal account of these arguably two different construction types. The central claim that I put forward is that passives and anticausatives differ only with respect to the event-type features of the verb but both arise through the same operation, namely suppression by special morphology of a feature in v that encodes the ontological event type of the verb. Crucially, I argue for two syntactic primitives, namely act and cause, whereto I trace the passive/anticausative distinction. Passive constructions across languages are made compatible by relegating the differences to simple combinatorial properties of verb and prepositional types and their interactions with other event functors, which are in turn encoded differently morphologically across languages. New arguments are brought forward for a causative analysis of anticausatives. Agentive adverbials are examined, and doubt is cast on the usefulness of by-phrases as a diagnostic for argumenthood.

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Metadaten
Author:Dalina Kallulli
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-309711
URL:http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/188.html
ISSN:1435-9588
ISSN:0947-7055
Parent Title (English):Proceedings of the Sinn und Bedeutung 10 : 10th annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, October 13 - 15, 2005, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin; ZASPil Vol. 44
Publisher:Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung
Place of publication:Berlin
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Year of Completion:2006
Year of first Publication:2006
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2013/11/14
GND Keyword:Funktionsverb; Faktiv; Passiv; Albanisch; Englisch
Volume:44
Page Number:12
First Page:171
Last Page:182
HeBIS-PPN:378088696
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Lexikologie/Etymologie / Lexicology/Etymology
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Grammatikforschung / Grammar research
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte:ZAS papers in linguistics : ZASPiL / ZASPiL 44 = Proceedings of the Sinn und Bedeutung 10
:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-306862
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht