We discuss the recent proposal by Koontz-Garboden (2009) (cf. also Chierchia 2004) that reflexively marked anticausative verbs (in Romance languages and beyond) are semantically reflexive. This proposal predicts that a sentence headed by a lexical causative verb should not entail the sentence headed by the reflexively marked anticausative counterpart. We uncover problems with the main argument for this claim and add further tests which show that a causative sentence does, in fact, entail its anticausative counterpart, whether reflexively marked or not. Our findings support standard semantics of the causative alternation according to which anticausatives, whether reflexively marked or not, denote inchoative one-place predicates. They also reconfirm that the relevant reflexive morphology is syncretic and does not necessarily derive reflexive semantics.
Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer. 2015. External Arguments in Transitivity Alternations: a Layering Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alexiadou, Artemis, Florian Schäfer, and Giorgos Spathas. 2014. “Delimiting Voice in Germanic: on Object Drop and Naturally Reflexive Verbs.” In Proceedings of NELS 44, ed. by Jyoti Iyer, and Leland Kusmer, 1-14. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Beavers, John, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden. 2013. “In Defense of the Reflexivization Analysis of Anticausativization.” Lingua 131: 199-216.
Bosque, Ignacio. 1980. Sobre la Negación. Madrid: Cátedra.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2004. “A Semantics for Unaccusatives and its Syntactic Consequences.” In The Unaccusativity Puzzle, ed. by Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Martin Everaert, 22-59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2006. “Only, Emotive Factives, and the Dual Nature of Polarity Dependency.” Language 82: 575-603.
Grimshaw, Jane. 1981. “On the Lexical Representation of Romance Reflexivie Clitics.” In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, ed. by Joan Bresnan, 87-148. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 1985. “Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity.” Language 61: 121-174.
Horvath, Julia, and Tal Siloni. 2011. “Anticausatives: Against Reflexivization.” Lingua 121: 2176-2186.
Horvath, Julia, and Tal Siloni. 2013. “Anticausatives Have no Causer: A Rejoinder to Beavers and Koontz-Garboden.” Lingua 131: 217-230.
Kemmer, Susanne. 1993. The Middle Voice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Koenig, Jean-Pierre, and Beate Benndorf. 1998. “Meaning and context: German aber and sondern.” In Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap, ed. by J.P. Koenig, 365-386. Stanford: CSLI publications.
Koontz-Garboden, Andrew. 2007. States, Changes of State, and the Monotonicity Hypothesis Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
Koontz-Garboden, Andrew. 2009. “Anticausativization.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 27: 77-138.
Levin, Beth, and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity. At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pitteroff, Marcel, and Florian Schäfer. 2014. “The Argument Structure of Reflexively Marked Anticausatives and Middles: Evidence from Datives.” In Proceedings of NELS 43, ed. by Hsin-Lun Huang, Ethan Poole, and Amanda Rysling, 67-78. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Reinhart, Tanya. 2002. “The Theta System: An Overview.” Theoretical Linguistics 28: 229-290.
Reinhart, Tanya, and Tal Siloni. 2005. “The Lexicon-Syntax Parameter: Reflexivization and Other Arity Operations.” Linguistic Inquiry 36: 389-436.
2020. Labile anticausatives in Jordanian Arabic. Lingua Posnaniensis 62:2 ► pp. 19 ff.
Fraser, Katherine
2019. The Athlete Tore a Muscle: English Locative Subjects in the Extra Argument Construction. In Language, Logic, and Computation [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11456], ► pp. 128 ff.
Boneh, Nora & Léa Nash
2017. The syntax and semantics of dative DPs in Russian ditransitives. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 35:4 ► pp. 899 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.