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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. 196–222

Chapter 7
The heterogeneity of anticausatives

A view from Balto-Slavonic

 | Vilnius University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
The chapter explores anticausatives in Slavonic and Baltic, focusing on subtypes that diverge in different ways from the canonical anticausative. It is often hard to identify their causal counterpart, which renders them hard to classify. Some arguably anticausative verbs could alternatively be viewed as antipassives, others show an agentive entailment that brings them closer to passives. All these verbs seem to constitute the periphery of the anticausative category, which is far from homogeneous. Alternative interpretations arise from a diachronic viewpoint: anticausatives can be defined as the result of lexical extension of an originally reflexive marker so that the verbs thus marked are no longer agents but patients or themes. Synchronically, the transitivity pairs singled out are often epiphenomenal.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Surface-impact anticausatives: The antipassive periphery
  • 3.Emotive verbs: Anticausatives or converses?
  • 4.Agent-entailing anticausatives: The passive periphery
  • 5.Notes on diachrony
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Internet sources
  • References
References (49)
Internet sources
bgTenTen21 at [URL]
csTenTen23 = Czech Web at [URL]
DWDS = Corpus of the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache at [URL]
hrWaC 2.2, ReLDI = Croatian Web at [URL]
iWeb at [URL]
ltTenTen21 = Lithuanian Web at [URL]
lvTenTen14 = Latvian Web at [URL]
PNC = Polish National Corpus at [URL]
ukTenTen22 = Ukrainian Web at [URL]
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