Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Anticausativization

The (anti)causative alternation is a transitivity alternation concerned with how languages express externally caused (CAUSAL) vs. spontaneously occurring (NONCAUSAL) events. Typologists have shown that languages resort to three main coding patterns to express such alternations (see Tubino-Blanco 2020): 

(i) CAUSATIVE: the causal member is overtly marked

Turkish öl- ‘die’ vs. öl-dür- ‘kill’

(ii) ANTICAUSATIVE: the noncausal member is marked

Italian scioglier-si ‘melt (intr.)’ vs. sciogliere ‘melt (tr.)’

(iii) EQUIPOLLENT: both members are equally marked, 

Yaqui bee-te ‘burn (intr.)’ vs. bee-ta ‘burn (tr.)’

Despite the structural parallelism, it has been pointed out that causative and anticausative markers (AMs) show a cross-linguistically unbalanced distribution. Not only are AMs typologically less frequent than causatives, but it is also rare for AMs to outnumber causatives in the lexicon of individual languages (Nichols et al. 2004). In fact, the very existence of the anticausative pattern, in which the semantically simpler member of the alternation receives a morphologically more complex marking, constitutes a puzzle, as it violates the iconicity principle (Haspelmath 2016: 593). Nevertheless AMs do exist, and, strikingly, they appear to be a relatively stable linguistic trait over time (e.g., Wichmann 2015).

Within individual languages, the distribution of AMs is not random, as some verbs trigger AMs more frequently than others. To explain these distributions, scholars have resorted to either verb semantics or frequency effects. Semantics-based accounts appeal to notions such as spontaneity (Haspelmath 1987) and claim that verbs lexicalizing events less likely to occur spontaneously are more likely to trigger AMs, because higher cognitive markedness entails higher structural markedness (Haspelmath 1993: 106). Frequency-based approaches explain marking asymmetries as mirroring frequency asymmetries, based on the assumption that higher usage frequency items are more predictable and thus favor shorter coding (Haspelmath 2021). This means that verbs that more routinely occur in noncausal contexts are less likely to receive AMs (Haspelmath et al. 2014). 

Overall, despite the wealth of (mostly synchronically oriented) existing research, the fundamental question as to why anticausatives exist remains open. To understand why anticausativization exists, one must explore how AMs arise in the first place, at least along two lines: (i) what are the historical sources of AMs across languages and (ii) how do AMs historically spread through the verbal lexicon of individual languages. Concerning (i), typological works mention only two such sources, reflexives and passives (e.g., Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019: 233), but this seems reductive, as there is evidence for alternative developments (Bahrt 2021; Inglese 2022). Concerning (ii), for in languages with ample historical documentation, as e.g., Romance languages, we still lack a detailed understanding of how AMs spread across time and, in particular, whether the lexical spread of AMs follows proposed generalizations on the distribution of AMs with particular verb classes, such as the spontaneity scale proposed by Haspelmath (2016) shown in (1).

(1) TRANSITIVE ‘cut’ > UNERGATIVE ‘talk’ > AUTOMATIC UNACCUSATIVE ‘melt’ > COSTLY UNACCUSATIVE ‘break’ > AGENTFUL ‘be cut’

The workshop is organized within the project Historical and typological perspectives on anticausativization, funded by the University of Turin (Department of Humanities) and carried out in collaboration with KU Leuven, and sponsored by the PhD program in Linguistics of the University of Pavia.