In many languages, verbs undergoing the causative-anticausative
alternation broadly fall into two morphological classes. For example,
French and Greek have unmarked anticausatives (1b, 3b) which are
morphologically identical to their corresponding causatives, and they
have marked anticausatives which are set aside from their corresponding
causatives by a special morphological device (2b, 4b). While French,
like many Indo-European languages, uses a reflexive clitic (*SE*) as
anticausative marker, Greek uses a verbal non-active affix (*nact*). We
provide a new argument that anticausative morphology *(AM)*must be
dissociated from anticausative/inchoative semantics and, instead,
reflects syntactic properties (Embick 2004, Schäfer 2008, Alexiadou et
al. 2015). Lexicalist Theories (e.g. Grimshaw 1982, Reinhart 2002,
Reinhart & Siloni 2005)that treat AM as the reflex of the application of
a lexical operation of decausativization fail to account for what we
call 'transitive anticausatives' *(TrACs) (5)*.
(1)a. Ana brûle la maison.
Ana burns the house
b. La maison (*se) brûle.(unmarked)
the house SE burns
(2) a.Pierre ouvre la porte.
Peter opens the door
b. La porte *(s') ouvre.(marked)
the door SE opens
(3)a. O Janis adiase ti sakula.
the John emptied.act the bag
b. I sakula adiase.(unmarked)
the bag emptied.act
(4)a.O Janis ekapse ti supa.
the John burnt.act the soup
b.I supa kaike/*ekapse(marked)
the soup burnt.nact/burnt.act
(5) [Les nuages_i ]ont changé / modifié [ [ leur_i ] forme]. (TrAC)
the clouds.nom have changed / modified their shape.acc
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