External Arguments in Transitivity Alternations: A Layering Approach
Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer
Abstract
This book is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. The empirical focus is the causative/anticausative alternation and the formation of (adjectival) Passives. The bulk of the discussion, couched within Distributed Morphology, is devoted to the properties of the (anti-)causative alternation, which the text takes to be a Voice alternation. It offers a detailed discussion of the morphological realization of anticausatives across languages, and argues that marked anticausatives involve expletive Voice and are not reflexi ... More
This book is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. The empirical focus is the causative/anticausative alternation and the formation of (adjectival) Passives. The bulk of the discussion, couched within Distributed Morphology, is devoted to the properties of the (anti-)causative alternation, which the text takes to be a Voice alternation. It offers a detailed discussion of the morphological realization of anticausatives across languages, and argues that marked anticausatives involve expletive Voice and are not reflexive predicates. In the discussion of Passives, the book argues that the fact that Passives in German and English—unlike their counterparts in Greek, where Passives are syncretic with anticausatives—are morphologically unique reflects the fact that they are also structurally unique. Passives in English and German involve Passive Voice, while they involve Middle Voice in Greek. The text furthermore shows that the distinction between target and resultant state participles is an important one in order to understand the contribution of Voice in adjectival Passives. Importantly, the study provided tools to probe into the morpho-syntactic structure of verbs and participles, and to identify the properties of verbal alternations across languages.
Keywords:
causative alternation,
anticausatives,
Expletive Voice,
Middle Voice,
Passive Voice,
Distributed Morphology,
reflexives,
adjectival participles,
syncretism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199571949 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571949.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Artemis Alexiadou, author
University of Stuttgart
Elena Anagnostopoulou, author
University of Crete
Florian Schäfer, author
Department of Linguistics, University of Stuttgart
More
Less
