Causation and External Arguments
نویسندگان
چکیده
In the realm of causativization, the traditional tension between explaining crosslinguistic variation while maintaining that a phenomenon has a common universal source can be stated specifically as follows: how can we explain the fact that if a certain type of verb causativizes in both languages A and B, the derived predicate usually has the same syntactic and semantic properties, while also accounting for the fact that the distribution of causativization in A and B can differ radically. The data in (1) and (2) illustrate the problem. The causativized unaccusatives in (1) pull us towards saying that causative predicates are derived in a unified way crosslinguistically: the forms in (1a-c) have essentially the same syntactic and semantic properties. However, when we examine causativization outside unaccusatives, a unified account becomes hard to maintain since in English causativization is limited to unaccusatives while in Finnish and in Japanese agentive verbs causativize as well, as is shown in (2):1
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