[PLing] WSG: Inglese (5. 3.), "Anticausatives that are not reflexives: historical and semantic considerations"

[Laura Grestenberger]

Liebe PLing-Liste,

(mit Entschuldigung für Cross-Posting)

Guglielmo Inglese (Università di Torino, Dipartimento di Studi 
Umanistici) wird am 5. März im Rahmen der Kolloquiumsreihe der Wiener 
Sprachgesellschaft zu "Anticausatives that are not reflexives: 
historical and semantic considerations" vortragen. Das Abstract finden 
Sie weiter unten in der E-Mail und auf der Homepage der WSG 
(https://wsg.univie.ac.at/veranstaltungen/guglielmo-inglese-anticausatives-that-are-not-reflexives-historical-and-semantic-considerations/?mc_id=38).

Datum & Uhrzeit: 5. März, 18.30h

Ort: Hörsaal 1, Sensengasse 3A, 1. OG

Interessierte sind herzlich willkommen!

Mit besten Grüßen,

Laura Grestenberger



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"Anticausatives that are not reflexives: historical and semantic 
considerations"

Abstract: The (anti)causative alternation, that is, the valency 
alternation whereby languages express spontaneous vs. externally caused 
events (e.g. the vase broke vs. the boy broke the vase), has been the 
object of extensive language-specific and cross-linguistic studies (see 
Nedjalkov & Silnitsky1973; Haspelmath 1987; Nichols, Peterson & Barnes 
2004; Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2015; Kittilä & Zúñiga 2019). 
In verb pairs that encode the alternation, marking on the noncausal 
member goes under the name of anticausative marking, while marking on 
the causal member is causative marking. While cross-linguistically 
overall less frequent than causativization, anticausative marking is a 
widespread phenomenon. In several languages, notably including Germanic 
and Romance ones, voice markers that express anticausativization may 
also encode other voice operations, chiefly reflexivity, as is the case 
of the voice marker si in Italian in (1).

(1) Italian

a. l’uomo si guarda allo specchio ‘the man sees himself in the mirror’
b. la finestra si rompe ‘the window breaks’

This pattern of voice syncretism is cross-linguistically quite robust 
and has fueled an intense
scholarly debate regarding whether anticausativization is a type of 
reflexivization (e.g. Koontz-Garboden 2009) or a voice operation of its 
own (e.g. Horvath & Siloni 2011).  Proponents of the former analysis 
point out that the reason to treat anticausatives as reflexive is that 
the two are often co-expressed and that reflexive marking is reported in 
the literature as the main, if not only, source of anticausativization 
(Haspelmath 1990; Kemmer 1993; Holvoet 2020; Cennamo 2020). In this 
talk, I discuss why some of the underpinnings of the 
"ANTICAUSATIVES-AS-REFLEXIVES" hypothesis are problematic. To begin 
with, patterns of voice syncretism are much more diverse than the 
reflexive-anticausative pattern only, and crucially, in several 
languages anticausatives are syncretic with other voice operations but 
not reflexivity (Bahrt 2021; Inglese 2022a). Second, there is evidence 
that historically anticausative markers may derive from sources distinct 
from reflexive (Inglese 2022b): these include non-reflexive voice 
operations, such as reciprocals, and a variety of lexical sources, 
including intransitive verbs such as ‘be(come)’, ‘fall’, ‘go’ and 
transitive verbs such as ‘get’, ‘give’, ‘hit’, spatial morphemes of 
various kind, spontaneous event markers, aspectual markers such as 
ingressive and resultative markers, nominalizers and verbalizers. 
Finally, following the approach laid out in Giomi & Inglese 
(forthcoming), I discuss how from a semantic perspective, which takes 
into account the distinction between semantic ambiguity and 
underspecification, anticausatives appear to be distinct from all other 
voice categories, including reflexives.



-- 
Dr. Laura Grestenberger
Elise-Richter-Fellow, Institut für Iranistik / Institute of Iranian 
Studies
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften / Austrian Academy of 
Sciences
Dominikanerbastei 16, 5. OG, A-1010 Wien
lauragrestenberger.com
Wiener Sprachgesellschaft, https://wsg.univie.ac.at/