Anticausative verb
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An anticausative verb (
Anticausative verbs are a subset of unaccusative verbs. Although the terms are generally synonymous, some unaccusative verbs are more obviously anticausative, while others (fall, die, etc.) are not; it depends on whether causation is defined as having to do with an animate volitional agent (does "falling" mean "being accelerated down by gravity" or "being dropped/pushed down by someone"? Is "old age" a causation agent for "dying"?).
A distinction must be made between anticausative and autocausative verbs. A verb is anticausative if the agent is unspecified but assumed to be external (or even if its existence is denied), and it is autocausative if the agent is the same as the patient. Many Indo-European languages lack separate morphological markings for these two classes, and the correct class needs to be derived from context:
(Lithuanian)
- Anticausative: Vežimėlis atsirišo nuo krūmo. 'The cart got untied from the bush.'
- Autocausative: Arklys atsirišo nuo krūmo. 'The horse got [itself] untied from the bush.'
(Russian)
- Anticausative: Чашка упала со стола и разбилась. Čaška upala so stola i razbilasʹ. 'The cup fell from the table and got broken.'
- Autocausative: Водитель разбился на горной дороге. Voditelʹ razbilsja na gornoj doroge. 'The driver crashed (lit. broke himself) on a mountain road.'
Examples
English
In
- He broke the window. → The window broke.
- Some pirates sank the ship. → The ship sank.
Passive voice is not an anticausative construction. In passive voice, the agent of causation is demoted from its position as a core argument (the subject), but it can optionally be re-introduced using an adjunct (in English, commonly, a by-phrase). In the examples above, The window was broken, The ship was sunk would clearly indicate causation, though without making it explicit.
Romance languages
In the
- El vidrio se quebró. 'The glass shattered.' (Infinitive: quebrar + se)
- Se está hundiendo el barco. or El barco se está hundiendo. or El barco está hundiéndose. 'The boat is sinking.' (Verbal periphrasis or compound verb: estar hundiendo + se in different positions, from the Infinitive: hundirse)
Another example in French:
- Les poissons se pêchaient et se vendaient. 'Fish were being fished and sold.'
Slavic languages
In the
- Staklo se razbilo. 'The glass shattered.'
In East Slavic languages (such as Russian), the pronoun se becomes postfix sja (or sʹ after a vowel in Russian).
- Стекло разбилось. Steklo razbilosʹ. 'The glass shattered.'
- Речка разливается. Rečka razlivaetsja. 'The river is flooding.'
The suffix -sja has a large number of uses and does not necessarily denote anticausativity (or even intransitivity). However, in most cases it denotes either passive voice or one of the subclasses of reflexivity (anticausativity, reciprocity, etc.)
There is a class of verbs (
- Иван надеется поступить в университет. Ivan nadeetsja postupitʹ v universitet. 'Ivan hopes to be admitted to the university.'
- Остановка автобуса оказалась рядом с нашей гостиницей. Ostanovka avtobusa okazalasʹ rjadom s našej gostinicej. 'The bus stop turned out to be near to our hotel.'
In addition, a verb may be put into an unaccusative/anticausative form by forming an impersonal sentence, with the verb typically either in its past tense neuter form, or in its present tense third person form:
- Штирлица тянуло на родину. Štirlica tjanulo na rodinu. 'Stirlitz felt himself being drawn to the motherland.' Literally, '[It] was dragging Stirlitz to the motherland.'
- Из окна дуло. Iz okna dulo. 'There was a draft from the window.' Literally, 'From the window [it] was blowing.' Note that the verb has neither agent nor patient, and therefore has valency zero: it is in the impersonal passive voice.
Here as well there is a class of "impersonal verbs", which only exist in this impersonal form:
- Ивана тошнит. Ivana tošnit. 'Ivan is feeling nauseous.' Literally, '[It] is making Ivan nauseous.' The verb тошнить tošnitʹ has no standard personal form. Instead of *Эта рыба меня тошнит *Eta ryba menja tošnit, to say 'This fish is making me nauseous', one must say От этой рыбы меня тошнит Ot etoj ryby menja tošnit 'Because of this fish, [it] is making me nauseous', where 'it' is not 'fish' but something that remains unspecified. (The personal form has, however, entered Russian vernacular, in the meaning 'to irritate, to pester'.)
- Мне везёт в картах. Mne vezjót v kartax. 'I am lucky at cards.' Literally, '[It] transports [things] for me at cards.'
Arabic
In the
Urdu
- کھانا پک رہا ہے khānā pak rahā he 'The food is cooking.'
- پانی ابل رہا ہے pānī ubal rahā he 'The water is boiling.'
Japanese
In Standard Japanese, productive morphology highly favors transitivization, in the sense that it has productive causativization, but no anticausativization. In the Hokkaido dialects and Northern Tōhoku dialect, however, the anticausative morpheme rasar is employed with some verbs, such as maku 'to roll', tsumu 'to load', and okuru 'to send' as a means of producing an intransitive verb from a transitive verb.[2]
Bardi
- boonda - ma - (y ERG closes x ABS)
a door might 'close' with the following construction
- boonda - jiidi - (x ABS closes)
In the underived construction, the light verb -ma- 'put' is used with a coverb (or preverb) boonda 'close'. In the anticausative construction, the light verb reduces the valency of the predicate and the item which is closed becomes the subject. This is a regular alternation among complex predicates.
See also
- Grammatical voice
- Mediopassive voice
- Unaccusative verb
External links and references
- Changing valency: Case studies in transitivity (edited by R. M. W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald, Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, Le Trobe University, Melbourne)
References
- ^ "Возможность употребления глагола в среднем залоге как основный признак категории отложительности" (PDF). Retrieved 3 August 2023.
- doi:10.15026/73104.