Abstract
Many recent theories of causative/inchoative alternations adopt an anticausativization analysis, wherein the inchoative is derived from the causative via some operation that eliminates the causer argument from a verb’s argument structure, provided the causer is semantically unspecified for agentivity (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Chierchia 2004; Koontz-Garboden 2009). We explore the properties of such an analysis for causative/inchoative alternations in Colloquial Sinhala, which are overtly indicated via a volitive/involitive stem contrast on the verb. We argue that the alternation arises from a causer suppression operation that deletes the causer syntactically but preserves it semantically, albeit formally marking it as unresolvable for agentivity. This prevents the verb from occurring in certain contexts requiring agentivity of a syntactically active argument, including the volitive stem, although such a reading may be derived pragmatically. The patient in turn shows a case alternation that we argue reflects two ways the suppressed causer can be interpreted—via reflexivization or existential binding. These data, we argue, support an anticausative analysis as elimination of causers unspecified for agentivity. They also expand the typology of ways agentivity is encoded and left unspecified, how causer elimination can occur, and what types of overt morphology can indicate the alternation.
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Notes
The following abbreviations are used: acc = accusative, caus = cause, dat = dative, def = definite, emph = emphatic, gen = genitive, inf = infinitive, inst = instrumental, inv = involitive, loc = locative, neg = negation, pl = plural, prs = present, prt = participle, post = postposition, pst = past, ques = question, refl = reflexive, sg = singular, vol = volitive.
Sinhala also has compound verbs, including those formed from nominal, adjectival, or verbal roots suffixed with -we- ‘do/become’ or -kərə- ‘do’, which themselves may surface as volitive or involitive (as discussed by Henadeerage 2002:55). Furthermore, volitive -kərə- vs. involitive -we- forms often mark causative/inchoative pairs. We do not distinguish these from non-compound pairs, since as far as we know this distinction is irrelevant to any claims we make regarding the relation of involitivity to anticausatives.
Differential object marking patterns vary across speakers. The pattern outlined here is that noted by Gair (1970:61–62), though our speakers tend to use accusative more or less obligatorily with animates and optionally with some inanimates. Kahr (1989:113–124) provides some additional discussion of which DPs may be considered animate (though our speakers find some of her data formal). The details of the pattern will not matter, as we are ultimately interested in what accusative case means when it does arise.
We use the ECOS/ICOS labels here as gross descriptive terms, though they were intended by Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) to distinguish verbs that describe change-of-state events that require a causer vs. those that do not. (See Alexiadou et al. 2006 and Alexiadou 2010 for a more nuanced classification of verb types building on this.) We later outline a notion of internal vs. external causation for ECOS verbs that distinguishes (self) causation by the patient vs. causation by some entity other than the patient respectively.
In some dialects transitive involitives also allow instrumental subjects:
- (i):
-
However, our informants did not find these acceptable (likewise for Jany 2005); we set them aside for now.
Literature on mirativity (DeLancey 1997, 2001; Dickinson 2000), the grammatical encoding of incongruency between an event and a speaker’s expectation of that event, suggests a similar overlap of volition and speaker expectation. A comparison of volitives and miratives, however, would take us too far afield.
We take the volitive to be the causative form, though most, but not all, volitive causatives also have involitive causative counterparts. Thus the causative may properly speaking be thought of as a root that may occur in at least the volitive and possibly the involitive. Conversely, inchoatives are always involitive. Sinhala also has a productive morphological causative -(w)ə- that can apply to any verb; we set this aside.
The data in (15), as well as those in (14b), do have acceptable but irrelevant pro-drop readings, where there is a separate null causer and the verbs are technically transitive; see below.
Arguing for a subject grammatical function in Sinhala is problematic. Henadeerage (2002:Chap. 3) (see also Gair 1976, 1990; Kahr 1989:36) makes a detailed argument that many otherwise cross-linguistically viable subjecthood diagnostics are inapplicable to Sinhala, because they either do not exist, are restricted to some property other than grammatical function, or pick out multiple DPs in a clause, not isolating one single class of DPs one could call “subjects”. Nonetheless, the diagnostics we discuss do seem to converge on one class of DPs, nominative A and S arguments of volitive clauses, that could be argued to be subjects.
Gair and Karunatillake (1998:130) suggest that for some speakers taman may not be subject-oriented, though it appears to be for our informants and Inman’s.
In the case of minimarannə ‘murder’ the fact that it has no detransitive counterpart is also independently predicated by the fact that it allows no involitive at all, due to its inherently volitional nature.
Languages do vary in which ECOS verbs alternate in causative/inchoative alternations, and some non-ECOS verbs show similar alternations in some languages (see e.g., Reinhart 2000 on ICOS verbs in Hebrew and McKoon and Macfarland 2000 on ICOS verbs in English, which do not alternate in Sinhala). However, Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995:Chap. 3) argue extensively that such so-called “causative pairs” with non-ECOS verbs do not represent the same causative/inchoative relationship found with ECOS verbs. Nonetheless, that Sinhala detransitives are lexically restricted argues against a general passive analysis.
This is different from the ECOS label adopted above to indicate verbs that describe changes-of-state that by default require a causer. The notion of “external” causation defined here is a subset of this where the causer is explicitly entailed to be a participant distinct from those expressed overtly in the clause. From here on out we use “external” causation in this sense, and ECOS as a descriptive label for a class of verbs.
We use the volitive transitive in (29b) for comparison, since the involitive is ruled out with purposives on its canonical non-volitional reading, for obvious reasons. We return to the issue in Sect. 5.1.
Non-expression of arguments follows from his Minimal Argument Constraint (p. 153), though Inman leaves open what non-expression means syntactically or semantically. He also assumes that this principle operates solely within the domain of involitives, so that detransitives are derived from transitive involitives. This fails to predict that some detransitives will not have involitive transitive counterparts as in (17).
A fourth argument given by Alexiadou et al. is that inchoatives show evidence of having causal semantics, in terms of taking PPs that express causers. However, this is not an argument against anticausativization, just an argument against analyses of inchoatives that do not suppose that they are underlyingly causative. The anticausative analysis we adopt (following Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Chierchia 2004; Koontz-Garboden 2009) assumes they are causative, so this argument does not apply.
Doron (2003:11–14) argues against an anticausative analysis for ECOS verbs only as an operation on verbs per se, suggesting instead that markedness asymmetries arise because roots that are realized as unmarked causative verbs are those that typically require instigators à la Croft (1990) or Haspelmath (1993). We concur, but do not see that this observation argues against treating the marked form as derived from the unmarked form (verbs or roots) when such an asymmetry exists.
One interesting difference between Sinhala and Spanish is that ICOS verbs in Spanish (according to Koontz-Garboden 2009:108) are generally unacceptable with por sí solo, suggesting that they lack causal semantics, while in Sinhala ibeemə is acceptable with these verbs, suggesting that they have causal semantics (see also Alexiadou et al. 2006). Since we are only concerned with derived inchoatives we ignore this issue, and leave an analysis of lexical inchoatives for future work.
An alternative anticausativization analysis to both deletion and reflexivization is an analysis where causation is preserved but the causer is existentially bound, a variant of the analysis of Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995). We in fact assume this is possible in Sinhala as well, and discuss it in Sect. 7.1.
Koontz-Garboden does not discuss exactly how his λ-terms relate to syntactic argument structure, e.g., how the arguments of dyadic and monadic predicates are realized. The details are not necessarily important here, save that we assume that by virtue of taking two individual arguments the verbs in (36) are transitive, while those with one individual argument as in (38) are intransitive, regardless of whether that single argument is the subject or an object that raises to subject position. For present purposes there is no need to appeal to a level of syntactic argument structure above and beyond the argument structure of the typed λ-theoretic denotations we give, and thus we set that aside here, though we do assume it exists.
That a certain verb form might have such a requirement is not unheard of; Doron (2003:18–19) notes that for certain verb roots in Hebrew the intensive transitive template can have a similar effect in requiring an action reading. An alternative to the disjunctive requirement we have posited for the Sinhala volitive could be that what the volitive requires of its subject is simply action, but deliberate non-action constitutes a type of action in some possible world but not the real world, i.e., an action embedded under a sublexical modality in the sense of Koenig and Davis (2001) (cf. also Dowty 1979:176 on agentive states as in John deliberately stood still). Either analysis would work just as well here.
These conclusions are also supported by the verbs Henadeerage (2002:137) non-exhaustively lists as having volitive stems, which includes many externally caused-change-of-state verbs that alternate with inchoatives. Our speakers have informally felt that such verbs require agentivity; non-deliberate neglect, if possible at all, requires involitive variants. However, we have found three exceptions, namely the word for ‘know’ in (35), the word for ‘like’ in (42), and the word for ‘exist’ used to indicate possession as in (i), which (a) take quirky dative subjects (also rare for a volitive verb) and (b) have non-actor readings.
- (i):
-
For the moment, we simply treat these as lexical exceptions.
Koontz-Garboden argues that the supposed implicational relationship in (51) is not an entailment as commonly assumed, but might be some weaker sort of inference. For us this is beside the point. All that matters is that the inchoative is judged as true at the same time as an agentive causative.
Recall that accusative only occurs on animates, and usually only optionally. Thus all of our patient arguments here are human, and the relevant class of verbs are those that take human patient arguments. Note that this pattern in general is less acceptable to some of our speakers, especially younger speakers, and may represent an older pattern that is dying out in the language.
At least one unergative is also acceptable to at least some of our informants with an accusative subject, namely the verb for ‘dance’, on the reading that the subject was compelled to dance by an outside source:
- (i):
-
We suggest that this may be a lexicalized exception, following a process of implicit causativization cross-linguistically attested for motion verbs (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Folli and Harley 2006).
An interesting ramification of this possibility is that technically the inchoative form for *The promise/contract broke is grammatical in Sinhala, but crucially only on a passive-type reading:
- (i):
-
Although the patient here is overtly nominative, as noted in Sect. 2 Sinhala shows differential object marking, so that inanimates rarely show overt accusative. Thus the object in (i) may be underlyingly accusative, and (i) is an accusative-subject inchoative, consistent with its interpretation. That only a passive-type reading is possible is in line with the cross-linguistically attested fact that not every causative use of ‘break’ verbs has a true inchoative reading, suggesting the causative form is unmarked as in Sect. 4.1.
A reviewer asks if accusative-subject inchoatives might be underlyingly transitive, as per the analysis of accusative subject inchoatives in various Germanic languages proposed by Schäfer (2008:291–302), who posits a null, semi-expletive external agent DP (see also Haider 2001 and Sigurðsson 2005). However, there is no evidence for a null argument in accusative-subject anticausatives in Sinhala, and the impossibility of purposives argues against positing an agent DP (and in Sinhala the accusative argument is clearly a subject, unlike in German, the only Germanic language where an expletive is overtly attested). Furthermore, the Sinhala constructions differ from the Germanic ones in being restricted to the same class of verbs that show regular anticausatives, i.e., those with effector-subject transitive variants. In Germanic the relevant verbs have agent-subject transitive counterparts (Sigurðsson 2005), suggesting that the two constructions are not identical. However, they do share in common entailing external causation, and below we present a truth-conditional analysis of this that does not rely on positing a null argument.
Reinhart (2000, 2002) likewise proposes a type of elimination specifically restricted to causers (arguments bearing the [+c] feature in her Theta System). This is also reminiscent of the analysis of Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (2004) of non-active voice morphology in Greek (building on Embick 1998, 2004) as the Spell-Out of a Voice/v head in a configuration without an external argument, with different instantiations (e.g., inchoative, reflexive, and passive) due to different syntactic and thematic features (see also Alexiadou et al. 2006; Alexiadou 2010). We return to this syncretism from a semantic perspective below.
Kaufmann (2007) proposes an analysis of middles (in the sense of Kemmer 1993, 1994) in Fula that also assumes unbound variables in need of binding, which may again be reflexive or existential (among other options). She extends this to anticausatives, but suggests that in this case the effector is disposed of by existentially binding off the entire causing event, although she does not say what the ultimate interpretation of the effector is. For the reasons discussed above, the analysis we have proposed, whereby the effector is reflexivized or existentially-bound, seems more appropriate for Sinhala anticausatives.
Whether a property or disposition causal reading is possible may depend on the choice of subject. As Beth Levin (p.c.) points out, The lightning destroyed the car lacks this reading, though as noted in Sect. 5.2 at least some natural forces may be defined only in terms of their actions (e.g., lightning is by definition electricity in motion), which may preclude or disprefer non-action readings.
This is also essentially Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s (1995:91) definition of internal causation. However, consistent with their later discussion (p. 92), this interpretation arises with ECOS verbs by coidentifying the external causer with the patient. See also Prior et al. (1982) on the causal basis of dispositions.
DeLancey (1984) also identifies a category of “inactive direct causation”, citing in particular diseases and states like hunger (e.g., Hunger killed him; p. 204; ex. (67)), that serve as invisible, but less prototypical causers due to a lack of volition. He partly motivates this category on the basis of special types of marked morphosyntactic encoding it receives in Hare and Newari, suggesting its grammatical relevance.
Such data preclude the analysis of the stem alternation of Henadeerage (2002). Henadeerage argues that the involitive stem found in inchoatives is a special use of the involitive that does not indicate any non-volitional semantics or anything else otherwise associated with involitives. However, (79) shows this is not the case. Furthermore, this association of the inchoative with the involitive stem is a stipulation on his analysis; on our analysis it follows directly from the meaning of an inchoative and the two stem forms.
Lexical ICOS inchoatives, which have no causative uses in Sinhala, are also all involitive. This follows if we assume they lexically have denotations that do not admit event subjects; see fn. 40.
Lavine (2010) discusses a similar sort of construction in Russian and Ukrainian, the so-called “transitive impersonal”, where an accusative subject can occur with an inchoative or passive only on a reading where there was external causation (we thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to us):
- (i):
-
Lavine analyzes this by positing a v head that encodes external causation and assigns accusative to the object, but does not itself license an external argument (following Pylkkänen 2008). This analysis has the same semantic intuition as ours, though we remain agnostic as to whether the denotations we give in turn determine different syntactic functional heads, for which we see no particular evidence in Sinhala.
We have not discussed verbs lexically selecting a stative causer. We leave this for future investigation, though bloom-type ICOS verbs may be such a case (cf. Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995:97).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to especially thank our informants, who spent many hours graciously discussing Sinhala verbs: Harendra Alwis, Dhanusha Amarasinghe, Kenneth DeAbrew, Manjula Dissanayake, Sahan Dissanayake, Shazard Izzadeen, Aruni Liyanage, and Khalid Zubair. We would also like to offer a special thanks to Beth Levin, Farzan Zaheed, and three anonymous NLLT reviewers for their extensive comments on an earlier draft, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden in particular for detailed comments on an earlier draft and extensive discussion that helped refine the ideas here. In addition, we thank Patrick Brandt, Alexis Dimitriadis, Donna Gerdts, Paul Kroeger, Jean-Pierre Koenig, John Peterson, Chris Piñón, György Rákosi, Bettina Zeisler, and audiences at the 2008 LSA Annual Meeting, the 2008 Cologne Workshop on Transitivity, the 2010 Paris Conference on Events and Subevents, and the 2012 Debrecen Workshop on Argument Structure for feedback on earlier versions of this work, though not all of their comments could be incorporated. Any errors or omissions are of course our own responsibility.
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Beavers, J., Zubair, C. Anticausatives in Sinhala: involitivity and causer suppression. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 1–46 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9182-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9182-4