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...

this project investigates the relationship between lexical semantics and causative morphology in the acquisition of causative/inchoative-related verbs in english as a foreign language by iranian speakers. results of translation and picture judgment task show although l2 learners have largely acquired the correct lexico-syntactic classification of verbs in english, they were constrained by the m...

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...