THE CAUSATIVE ALTERNATION REVISITED: CONSTRAINTS AND VARIATION

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...

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...

Causative-Inchoative Alternation in Persian

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...

Treewidth with a Quantifier Alternation Revisited

In this paper we take a closer look at the parameterized complexity of ∃∀SAT, the prototypical complete problem of the class Σp2, the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. We provide a number of tight fine-grained bounds on the complexity of this problem and its variants with respect to the most important structural graph parameters. Specifically, we show the following lower bounds (assumin...