The morphological patterns of anticausatives and their interpretations

Across languages verbs of change of state (and change of degree) can participate in the causative alternation, i.e. they show either a transitive (causative) or an intransitive (anticausative/inchoative) use. (1) a. The wind broke the window (English) b. The window broke (2) a. Il vento ha rotto la finestra (Italian) b. La finestra è rotta (3) a. Der Wind zerbricht das Fenster (German) b. Das Fenster zerbricht The meanings of these two variants are always closely related: (i) the meaning of the transitive variant is roughly ‘cause to V-intransitive’ (ii) the subject of the intransitive variant and the object of the transitive variant bear the same thematic role (4) a. causer – V-transitive – undergoer b. undergoer – V-intransitive The possibility to participate in the causative alternation has been claimed to be a diagnostic of unaccusativity. Many (but not all) unaccusative verbs participate in this alternation. Verbs that are considered prototypical unergatives never do. (5) a. The crowd laughed b. *The comedian laughed the crowd (cf. The comedian made the crowd laugh) In the literature the causative alternation was used as a probe into the nature of unaccusativity. In order to arrive at the semantic characterization of the unaccusative class the question was “what element of meaning sets causative alternation verbs like break apart from nonaltering verbs like speak ” (c.f. Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995). 1.1 Theories about the derivational relation between causatives and anticausatives: It was assumed, that one and only one variant of these alternating verbs is listed in the mental lexicon and that the other variant is derived from the listed one. Two directions of derivation are possible and both have been proposed: (I) detransitivization: transitive intransitiv