Abstract
The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb's meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 677-729 |
Number of pages | 53 |
Journal | Linguistics |
Volume | 53 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 by De Gruyter Mouton.
Other keywords
- active intransitive
- anticausativization
- aspect
- case marking
- control
- Latin
- mediopassive
- middle
- oblique intransitive
- Old Norse-Icelandic
- reflexive