Lability and spontaneity

Alexander Letuchiy | Russian Language Institute, Moscow

The present paper focuses on labile verbs – lexemes which can behave transitively or intransitively without a formal change. Haspelmath (1993a) and Comrie (2006) claim that the semantic spontaneity is the crucial factor for the distribution of inchoative/causative oppositions, based on data of the causative and the anticausative formal type. In contrast, my analysis of labile verbs across languages shows that for lability, another factor is crucial, namely, the semantic classification of verbs. In particular, the groups as motion verbs, destruction verbs, and phasal verbs tend to be labile across languages.

Published online: 17 November 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.166.10let

Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

Bermejo, Víctor Lara

2019. Lability in Western Peninsular Spanish. Studia Linguistica 73:2 ► pp. 203 ff.

HASPELMATH, MARTIN, ANDREEA CALUDE, MICHAEL SPAGNOL, HEIKO NARROG & ELİF BAMYACI

2014. Coding causal–noncausal verb alternations: A form–frequency correspondence explanation. Journal of Linguistics 50:3 ► pp. 587 ff.

HEIDINGER, STEFFEN

2015. Causalness and the encoding of the causative–anticausative alternation in French and Spanish. Journal of Linguistics 51:3 ► pp. 562 ff.

Lara, Victor

2017. Patrones de ergatividad en el español peninsular. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 25:1 ► pp. 93 ff.

Letuchiy, Alexander

2017. In Verb Valency Changes [Typological Studies in Language, 120], ► pp. 258 ff.

Pacchiarotti, Sara & Leonid Kulikov

2022. Bribri media tantum verbs and the rise of labile syntax. Linguistics 60:2 ► pp. 617 ff.

Vivanco, Margot

2021. In Unraveling the complexity of SE [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 99], ► pp. 291 ff.

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