Ibibio Causative and Anti-Causative Verb Alternations

Unaccusative-Causative Alternations and the Dynamic Structure of Verbs

Many transitive verbs have a so-called unaccusative alternant. The existence of such alternants raises the question of how the class of verbs that exhibit this alternation can semantically be characterized. In this paper a theory is presented in which the existence of unaccusative alternants is derived from basic semantic properties that are used for an aspectual interpretation of verbs. The th...

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...

A Dynamic Semantic Account of Causative Psych Verb Constructions*

Verb Classes and Alternations

In this report, we investigate the relationship between the semantic and syntactic properties of verbs. Our work is based on the English Verb Classes and Alternations of (Levin, 1993). We explore how these classes are manifested in other languages, in particular, in Bangla, German, and Korean. Our report includes a survey and classiication of several hundred verbs from these languages into the ...

Inheriting Verb Alternations

The paper shows how the verbal lexicon can be formalised in a way that captures and exploits generalisations about the alternation behaviour of verb classes. An alternation is a pattern in which a number of words share the same relationship between • a pair of senses. The alternations captured are ones where the different senses specify different relationships between syntactic complements and ...