Nonactive Voice in Hebrew and Elsewhere: Between Unaccusativity and Agentivity

Itamar Kastner (NYU) 1. The focus of this paper is the nonactive Hebrew verbal template hitpa'el, in which three root consonants are arranged in the basic form hitXaYYeZ (citation form, M.SG). In this kind of rootand-pattern morphology, the middle consonant is geminated, the root is prefixed with hitand certain vowels are inserted. HitXaYYeZ verbs are never transitive; empirically, I explain the possible interpretations of different Hebrew roots under this nonactive morphology. Theoretically, I explore the different argument structure alternations that might arise through nonactive morphosyntax; these alternations run the gamut from true anticausatives to volitional verbs such as reflexives. I also specify the functional heads that derive the different structures. 2. The hitXaYYeZ template is derived using two functional heads (Doron 2003; Kastner 2014). The first is vACT, which types the event as an Action (volitional) in the semantics and geminates the middle consonant in the phonology. This head is attested elsewhere in the verbal system, namely in the "intensive" template whose verbs denote agentivity or direct causation. The second is a functional head which blocks the introduction of an external argument in the syntax and which adds a prefix in the phonology. This head can be either VoiceØ, a Middle Voice head (Doron 2003; Alexiadou and Doron 2012; Kastner 2014), or pØ, the functional head introducing a PP. The subject of a prepositional phrase is merged in the specifier of pP, unless the head is pØ (Kastner 2014; Svenonius 2007; Wood, to appear): [VoiceP ... [vP [v [v √Root] [pP DP [p [P DP]]]]]] 3. The important thing to note about the different nonactive verbs in hitXaYYeZ is that some seem more volitional than others, just like unaccusative break is less volitional than unaccusative arrive (Irwin 2012 posits different structures for the English pair). Following this intuition, I will claim that there are two main types of hitXaYYeZ verbs. These will be analyzed as having two different underlying structures, each of which gives rise to the same template: internallytriggered change of state hitXaYYeZ verbs (internal COS) are volitional at least to some extent and derived using vACT and pØ. Externally-triggered change of state hitXaYYeZ verbs (external COS) are derived using vACT and VoiceØ. But the structure also interacts with the lexical semantics of the root, constraining the meaning of the resulting verb. Alexiadou (to appear) argues that some roots are inherently reflexive (√SHAME), some are naturally reflexive/reciprocal (√WASH) and some are naturally disjoint (√HATE). External COS verbs are unaccusative, and their interpretation varies depending on the root. Internal COS verbs always take a prepositional phrase complement. The table in (1) summarizes. (1) Inherently reflexive Naturally reflexive Naturally disjoint