Cover not available

In:Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Anticausativization
Edited by Guglielmo Inglese, Giulia Mazzola and Eugenio Goria
[Typological Studies in Language 138] 2026
► pp. 287–332

Chapter 10
Anticausativization and lability in Romance

A historical corpus study on Spanish and Italian

 | University of Torino
 | Newcastle University
 | University of Torino
 | University of Bergamo
 | KU Leuven
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This comparative diachronic corpus study of Italian and Spanish focuses on the alternation between anticausativization (reflexive marking) and lability as noncausal marking strategies. By using mixed-effects logistic regression on historical data, we demonstrate the relevance of a variety of morphosyntactic, semantic, and cognitive parameters, and assess their stability across time and languages. Our results show that, diachronically, the alternation undergoes a telicity-based polarization and that SE spreads from controlled to non-controlled events. Our comparative findings suggest that the alternation in Italian is more sensitive to contextual factors (telicity), while in Spanish it responds, to a greater extent, to lexical constraints (causalness degree). To conclude, we discuss the interconnection among different factors and their relationship with the restructuring of the tense and voice systems from Latin to Romance.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The causal-noncausal alternation in Italian and Spanish
  • 3.Data, hypotheses and methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Annotation
    • 3.3Hypotheses
    • 3.4Methodology
  • 4.Anticausatives vs. lability: Predicting the encoding of noncausal situations
    • 4.1The random forest model
    • 4.2The mixed-effect logistic regression model
      • 4.2.1Random vs. fixed effects
      • 4.2.2Results: Simple effects
      • 4.2.3Results: Diachronic effects
      • 4.2.4Results: Interactions by language
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
  • Appendix
References (77)
References
Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou & Florian Schäfer. 2015. External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bahrt, Nicklas N. 2021. Voice syncretism. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benito Moreno, Carlota de. 2022. The middle voice and connected constructions in Ibero-Romance. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bentley, Delia. 2006. Split intransitivity in Italian. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2023. Internally caused change as change by inner predisposition: Comparative evidence from Romance. Journal of Linguistics 60(3): 483–525. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bertinetto, Pier Marco. 1986. Tempo, aspetto e azione nel verbo italiano: il sistema dell’indicativo. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina & Harald Baayen. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In Cognitive foundations of interpretation, Gerlof Bouma, Irene Krämer & Joost Zwarts (eds), 69–94. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan & Marilyn Ford. 2010. Predicting syntax: processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English. Language 86(1): 168–213. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia. 2017. Voice and voice alternations. In Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax, Andrea Dufter & Elisabeth Stark (eds), 230–271. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cennamo, Michela. 2012. Aspectual constraints on the (anti)causative alternation in Old Italian. Transactions of the Philological Society 110(3): 394–421. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. Voice. In The Oxford guide to the Romance languages, Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds), 967–980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2020a. The actualization of new voice patterns in Romance. Persistence in diversity. In Historical linguistics 2017, Bridget Drinka (ed), 109–142. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2020b. Mechanisms and paths of grammaticalization and reanalysis in Romance. In Grammaticalization scenarios: cross-linguistic variation and universal tendencies. Volume 1 Grammaticalization Scenarios from Europe and Asia, Walter Bisang & Andrej Malchukov (eds), 165–248. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2021. Anticausatives and lability in Italian and French: a diachronic-synchronic comparative study. In Valency over time, Silvia Luraghi & Elisa Roma (eds), 265–304. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cennamo, Michela, Thórhallur Eythórsson & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2015. Semantic and (morpho)syntactic constraints on anticausativization: Evidence from Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. Linguistics 53(4): 677–729. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cennamo, Michela & Elisabetta Ježek. 2011. The anticausative alternation in Italian. In Traduzione e idea di traduzione nel tempo e nella società, 809–823. Bulzoni. Roma.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Civardi, Eugenio & Pier Marco Bertinetto. 2015. The semantics of degree verbs and the telicity issue. Borealis — An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 4(1): 57–77. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cornillie, Bert & Giulia Mazzola. 2022. A Sociopragmatic Account of the se Passive in (pre-)Classical Spanish. In Cognitive Sociolinguistics Revisited, Gitte Kristiansen, Karlien Franco, Stefano De Pascale, Laura Rosseel & Weiwei Zhang (eds), 226–241. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2012. Verbs: aspect and causal structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
D’Achille, Paolo & Maria Grossmann (eds). 2017. Per la storia della formazione delle parole in italiano: un nuovo corpus in rete (MIDIA) e nuove prospettive di studio. Firenze: Franco Cesati.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2019. The Grammar network: how linguistic structure is shaped by language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dowty, David R. 1979. Word meaning and Montague grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Drinka, Bridget. 2017. Language contact in Europe: the periphrastic perfect through history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Engel, Alexandra. 2022. The register-specificity of probabilistic grammars in English and Dutch. Combining corpus analysis and experimentation. PhD Dissertation, KU Leuven.
Folli, Raffaella. 2002. Constructing telicity in English and Italian. PhD dissertation, University of Oxford
Fox, John & Sanford Weisberg. 2019. An {R} Companion to Applied Regression. 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gianollo, Chiara. 2014. Labile verbs in Late Latin. Linguistics 52(4): 945–1002. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Greenwell, Brandon M. & Bradley, Boehmke C. 2020. Variable importance plots — An introduction to the vip package. The R Journal 12(1): 343. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2005. Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34(4). 365–399. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th & Martin Hilpert. 2012. Variability-based neighbor clustering: A bottom-up approach to periodization in historical linguistics. In The Oxford handbook of the history of English, Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds), 134–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haiman, John. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59(4): 781–819. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harrell, Frank Jr. 2019. Hmisc: Harrell Miscellaneous. R package version 4.2–0. [URL]
Haspelmath, Martin. 1987. Transitivity alternations of the anticausative type. Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. More on the typology of the inchoative/causative verb alternations. In Causatives and transitivity, Bernard Comrie & Maria Polinsky (eds), 87–120. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
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): 587–625. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heidinger, Steffen. 2010. French anticausatives: A diachronic perspective. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. The persistence of labile verbs in the French causative-anticausative alternation. Linguistics 52(4): 1003–1024. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. Causalness and the encoding of the causative–anticausative alternation in French and Spanish. Journal of Linguistics 51(3): 562–594. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022. Valency in the Romance languages. In Oxford research Encyclopaedia of linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd. 2002. On the role of context in grammaticalization. In New reflections on grammaticalization, Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds), 83–102. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Inglese, Guglielmo. The Hittite middle voice: synchrony, diachrony, typology. Leiden & Boston: Brill.
Ježek, Elisabetta. 2003. Classi di verbi tra semantica e sintassi. Pisa: ETS.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Costruzioni con verbo pronominale in italiano antico. In Nicola Grandi & Gabriele Iannàccaro (eds), Zhì: scritti in onore di Emanuele Banfi in occasione del suo 60. compleanno, 303–320. Bologna: Caissa Italia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kabatek, Johannes. 2018. Lingüística coseriana, lingüística histórica, tradiciones discursivas. Madrid & Frankfurt a.M.: Iberoamericana Vervuert. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kailuweit, Rolf. 2013. Construcciones anticausativas: el español comparado con el francés. In Aspectualidad — Transitividad — Referencialidad. Las lenguas románicas en contraste, Valeriano Bellosta Von Colbe & Marco Garcia Garcia (eds), 133–158. Berlin: Peter Lang. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kittilä, Seppo & Fernando Zúñiga. 2019. Grammatical Voice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuteva, Tania, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee. 2019. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levshina, Natalia. 2020. Conditional Inference Trees and Random Forests. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, Magali Paquot & Stefan Th. Gries (eds), 611–643. Berlin: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lüdecke, Daniel. 2018. ggeffects: Tidy Data Frames of Marginal Effects from Regression Models. Journal of Open Source Software 3(26). 772. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2018. The Romance Verb: Morphomic Structure and Diachrony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Makowski, Dominique, Daniel Lüdecke, Indrajeet Patil, Rémi Thériault, Mattan S. Ben-Shachar & Brenton M. Wiernik. 2023. Automated Results Reporting as a Practical Tool to Improve Reproducibility and Methodological Best Practices Adoption. CRAN. [URL]
Mazzola, Giulia. 2022. Syndetic and asyndetic complementation in Spanish. A diachronic probabilistic account. PhD Dissertation, KU Leuven.
Mazzola, Giulia & Guglielmo Inglese. 2026. Causalness, frequency, diachrony and the causal-noncausal alternation in Italian and Spanish. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Melis, Chantal & Silvia Peña-Alfaro. 2007. El desarrollo histórico de la pasiva con se en español. Romance Philology 61(1): 47–77. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nichols, Johanna, David A. Peterson & Jonathan Barnes. 2004. Transitivizing and detransitivizing languages. Linguistic Typology 8(2): 149–211. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ongenae, Tim A. F. 2024. Permittito aperiat oculum: typological considerations on P-lability and its interaction with morphosyntactic alignment in Latin medical texts. Folia Linguistica 58: s45–s1, 79–113. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pescarini, Diego. 2024. SE Constructions in the Romance Languages. Oxford research Encyclopaedia of linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Portilla Chaves, Mario. 2007. Diacronía de las construcciones con pronombres reflexivos en español. Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica 33(1): 131–149. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2023. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Manual. Vienna. [URL]
Real Academia Española. 2013. Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH). [URL]. (7 May, 2024).
Real Academia Española. 2024. Corpus de referencia del español actual (CREA Anotado). [URL]. (19 April, 2024).
Rodríguez Molina, Javier. 2010. La gramaticalización de los tiempos compuestos en español antiguo: cinco cambios diacrónicos. PhD Dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Sansò, Andrea. 2011. Grammaticalization and prototype effects: A history of the agentive reflexive passive in Italian. Folia Linguistica Historica 32: 219–251. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schauberger, Philipp & Alexander Walker. 2021. openxlsx: Read, Write and Edit xlsx Files. [URL]
Squartini, Mario. 2003. La grammaticalizzazione di 〈venire + participio〉 in Italiano. In Perífrasis verbales en las lenguas (iberos-)románicas, Claus D. Pusch & Andreas Wesch (eds), 23–34. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. Diachronic probabilistic grammar. English Language and Linguistics 19(3): 41–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review 66(2): 143–160. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vietri, Simonetta. 2017. Usi verbali dell’italiano: le frasi anticausative. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2023. Causalness and the Encoding of the Causative/Anticausative Alternation in Italian Psych Verbs. Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale 57: 57–86.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vivanco, Margot. 2021. Scalar Constraints on Anticausative SE: The Aspectual Hypothesis Revisited. In Unraveling the complexity of SE, Grant Armstrong & Jonathan E. MacDonald (eds), 291–318. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wickham, Hadley. 2023. stringr: Simple, Consistent Wrappers for Common String Operations. 〈[URL]〉.
Wickham, Hadley, Mara Averick, Jennifer Bryan, Winston Chang, Lucy McGowan, Romain François, Garrett Grolemund, et al. 2019. Welcome to the Tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software 4(43): 1686. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wickham, Hadley & Jennifer Bryan. 2009. readxl: Read Excel Files. R package version 1.3.1. [URL]
Wright, Marvin N. & Andreas Ziegler. 2017. ranger : A Fast Implementation of Random Forests for High Dimensional Data in C++ and R. Journal of Statistical Software 77(1). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhu, Hao. 2024. kableExtra: Construct Complex Table with “kable” and Pipe Syntax. [URL]. (23 April, 2024).
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue