Against the Psych Causative Alternation in Polish

Causative motor actions and the causative alternation

Certain verbs (e.g. bend, break) can undergo the causative alternation, appearing both in a transitive form (John bent the lever) and an intransitive form (The lever bent). To explain this alternation, linguists have proposed that the transitive form of the alternation conveys an action with an explicitly causative structure— for example that John bent the lever indirectly conveys the propositi...

causative alternation in persian

in this article, the causative alternation in persian is discussed. first, it is shown that persian anticausative verbs involve a cause component and an implicit external argument. second, we claim that causative alternation arises when a single change-of-state verb invokes more than one semantic frame (fillmore, 1985): causative frame and anticausative frame. these semantic frames are the resu...

Causative-Inchoative Alternation in Persian

Lexicon Uniformity and the causative alternation

With respect to the first question, the perceived additional semantic complexity of the transitive or ‘causative’ variant—its explicit association with a notion of cause—may suggest that the transitive variant is derived from the intransitive or ‘anticausative’ variant1 by the addition of a CAUSE operator (e.g., Dowty 1979: 91; Härtl 2003; Lakoff 1966; Parsons 1990). This position is reinforced...

A Dynamic Semantic Account of Causative Psych Verb Constructions*