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 by the additional morphology associated with at least some verbs in this variant in some languages. In contrast, the intransitive variant is taken as derived by others (e.g., Chierchia 2003; Grimshaw 1982: 103ff; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995: 108; Reinhart 2002: 241, to appear: 27), most often because its verb is usually morphologically more complex than the verb in the causative variant in many languages, including French, Italian, and Russian (see also Koontz-Garboden 2009).