Query Details
| Query Subject: |
Alternating Unaccusative Verbs and the Reflexive
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| Author: | Konrad Szczesniak | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Semantics
Syntax Typology |
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| Query: |
Dear Linguists,
I am working on the much-discussed causative analysis of unaccusative verbs and I'm looking for examples of the following phenomenon in as many languages as possible: It is a widely recognized regularity that alternating unaccusative verbs in some languages (especially Romance and Slavic languages) require a reflexive clitic in the intransitive/inchoative pattern. For example, in Polish one says Dziecko zamroziło mleko (The child froze the milk) Mleko zamroziło SIE (The milk froze REFLEXIVE-SIE) This fact is addressed and explained very well by most current approaches to unaccusativity and the causative alternation. But what these approaches don't capture very well is that in Polish (and probably in many other languages), a sizable portion of such unaccusative verbs has non-reflexive inchoative equivalents: Mleko zamroziło SIE / Mleko zamarzło Milk froze REFLEXIVE-SIE / Milk froze (non-reflexive [NR]) Now, the non-reflexive version does not participate in the causative alternation: *Dziecko zamarzło mleko (The child froze[NR] the milk) Can you send me similar examples of non-reflexive non-alternating unaccusative verbs in other languages - verbs which are only used in the inchoative/intransitive structure? I would greatly appreciate examples both from Slavic and Romance languages as well as ones from non-European languages, which I will later post as a summary. Thank you. Best regards, Konrad Szczesniak Institute of English Silesian University Poland |
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| LL Issue: | 16.1023 | |
| Date posted: | 04-Apr-2005 | |
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