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Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency
Edited by Lars Hellan, Andrej L. Malchukov and Michela Cennamo
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 237] 2017
► pp. 431–469

Circumfixed causatives in Polish against a panorama of active and non-active voice morphology

| Catholic University of Lublin
This paper deals with an interesting problem of circumfixed causatives in Polish, which do not behave with respect to anticausatives in the way causative structures function in other (European) languages. This subclass of causatives does not have corresponding synthetic (single-word) anticausatives, while other causatives in Polish possess such correspondents. We propose to explain this situation within the model of root based construction morphology, where causatives assume no derivational connection with other verbs: Nevertheless they arise from the substructures resulting in causative meaning , which are shared with anticausatives. The substructures, together with the delimited class of roots common to causatives and anticausatives, allow us to account for the similarities in the alternating part of the material. The adverse relationship that the circumfixed causatives have with the synthetic anticausatives will be accounted for with the use of the distinction into Active voice and Non-active voice verbal structures, which has been proposed within the root-based morpho-syntax by Alexiadou and Doron (2012).
Article outline
  • 1.Morpho-syntax from the generative perspective
    • 1.1Derivational and root-based approaches to morpho-syntactic problems
    • 1.2The root-based model for valency phenomena
    • 1.3Causative/anticausative morpho-syntax (Alexiadou & Doron 2012)
  • 2.The data
    • 2.1Circumfixed causatives in Polish
    • 2.2Circumfixed causatives in related languages
  • 3.Causative semantics of anticausatives
  • 4.Structural representation of causation
  • 5.The roots appearing in the valency enhancement/valency reduction alternation
  • 6.Statives with corresponding causatives
    • 6.1Statives
    • 6.2Causatives from the roots marked as [+ predicates of states], [+ predicates of events] vis-à-vis the lack of corresponding anticausatives
    • 6.3Statives with the roots marked as [+ predicates of states] and [+ predicates of events] vis-à-vis the lack of corresponding anticausatives
  • 7.Experiencer verbs with corresponding causatives
  • 8. Się anticausatives in Polish
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpora
Published online: 30 April 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.237.14mal
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