Causative alternation

In linguistics, causative alternation is a cross-linguistic phenomenon in which certain verbs that express a change of state (or a change of degree) can be used transitively or intransitively. A causatively alternating verb, such as "open", has both a transitive meaning ("I opened the door") and an intransitive meaning ("The door opened"). When causatively alternating verbs are used transitively they are called causatives since, in the transitive use of the verb, the subject is causing the action denoted by the intransitive version. When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively, they are referred to as anticausatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant (in this case "the door") undergoes a change of state, becoming, for example, "opened".

Example of the causative alternation with the English verb 'break':

The general structure of the causative and anticausative variants of the causative alternation in English:

The causative alternation is a transitivity alternation. The verb “break” demonstrates causative alternation because it can alternate between transitive (in the causative) and intransitive use (in the anticausative) and the transitive alternate “John broke the vase’' indicates the cause of the intransitive alternate “the vase broke.” In other words, the transitive use denotes that it was John that caused the vase to break. The causative alternative has an external argument (“John”), which bears the theta role agent which is not present in the intransitive alternative. The object of the causative alternative (“the vase”) bears the same thematic role of theme as the subject of the anticausative alternative (also “the vase”).

Cross-linguistically, the verbs that participate in the causative alternation are anticausatives which denote movement or a change of state or degree.

Under one possible and fairly common analysis (called the Unnacusative Hypothesis), unaccusatives and unergatives form the two subclasses of intransitive verbs. Unaccusative verbs cannot assign case to their deep-structure object which bears the theme/patient thematic role; because of this, the object moves to the subject position in the surface form in order to obtain case in accordance with Burzio's generalization. The movement of "the book" from object position to subject position is traced in example (3a). Therefore, unaccusative verbs take a semantic theme or patient subject. On the other hand, unergative verbs take a semantic agent or initiator subject.

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