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In:Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Anticausativization
Edited by Guglielmo Inglese, Giulia Mazzola and Eugenio Goria
[Typological Studies in Language 138] 2026
► pp. 119–152

Chapter 5
The rise and fall of anticausative marking in Aramaic

 | HSE University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This chapter examines the evolution of anticausative marking (overt marker in noncausal verb) in Aramaic languages over a period of 3000 years. I describe the inventories of detransitivising markers (verbal stems) in Old, Middle and Modern Aramaic and show that the Aramaic material challenges typological assumptions about the stability of (de)transitivising morphemes. The Proto-Semitic anticausative N-stem disappeared early in Proto-Aramaic, while detransitive t-stems became more productive in pre-modern Aramaic and were then lost in most Modern Aramaic varieties. By studying 31 verb pairs in 10 Aramaic languages from different periods, I show that P-lability is increasingly replacing anticausative marking in all Modern Aramaic languages. This process was found to occur even in Modern Western Aramaic, which has preserved a productive (de)transitivising morphology.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.General remarks on Aramaic
    • 2.1Classification of Aramaic languages
    • 2.2Changing valency in Aramaic: Verbal stems
  • 3.Diachrony of the detransitivisation in Aramaic
    • 3.1N-stem
    • 3.2T-stems in pre-modern Aramaic
    • 3.3T-stems in Modern Aramaic
      • 3.3.1Modern Western Aramaic
      • 3.3.2Eastern Neo-Aramaic: T-stems without t-
    • 3.4Preliminary generalisations about the history of Aramaic detransitivisation
  • 4.The causal-noncausal alternation in Aramaic
    • 4.1Methodology and typological generalisations
    • 4.2Data collecting
    • 4.3Transitivity profiles of Aramaic languages
    • 4.4Encoding types of individual verb pairs
    • 4.5Lability drift
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Glossary
  • Glossary
  • References
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