Yet Another Piece of Evidence for the Common Base Approach to Japanese Causative/Inchoative Alternations

This paper presents yet another argument for the view that both the causative and inchoative verbs in the Japanese causative alternation are syntactically equally complex, derived independently from common bases. While morphological considerations alone suggest that such an approach must be taken to account for cases involving equipollent alternations, which have overt morphemes for both the causative and inchoative affixes, the question remains unsettled as to whether there are cases where such processes as causativization of inchoative verbs or anticausativization of causative verbs are involved. In an attempt to answer this question, this paper examines the three approaches to the causative alternation by utilizing the possibility of having idiomatic interpretations as a probe into the syntactic structure. Evidence from idioms reveals that the common base approach still fares better. As a further consequence, postulation of a phonologically null morpheme is forced for some causative and inchoative affixes.