Labile verb
For example, the phrases "John broke the window, or maybe Jack did – at any rate, the window broke" and "John solved the problem, or maybe Jack did – at any rate, the problem was solved" both have quite naturally understandable meanings, though they are slightly idiomatic.
The labile verb enables not only the omission of the outside agent, but also the implication that the affected party is somehow causing the action.
This can be done neutrally when the affected party can be considered an institution or corporate entity and the individual member responsible for the action is unimportant, for example "the shop closed for the day".
It can also avoid assigning blame when journalists are sympathetic to a particular causative agent, as in "Eight factories have closed this year."
Cross-linguistically, the verbs that participate in the causative alternation are anticausatives which denote movement or a change of state or degree.
[3][9][10] 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.
Though some unaccusative verbs can undergo causative alternation (anticausatives), it is never the case that an unergative (like "laugh") can.
[5][3] For instance, a change of state verb like 'bloom' does not show causative alternation as it is a pure unaccusative.
"[3] The general consensus in the field is that there is a derivational relationship between verbs undergoing the causative alternation that share the same lexical entry.
Under a syntactic intransitive base approach, the transitive form is derived from the intransitive form by insertion of a verbal layer projected by a head expressing causation and introducing the external agent argument.
In the syntax, the causative form is derived through the addition of an init-head, which introduces the external initiator argument ("Katherine") in example (9b).
[3] Children typically begin to generate causatively alternating verbs around the age of 1;11 (years;months).
It has been suggested that causative alternation errors come from three sources:[20][21] Children with specific language impairments (SLI) tend to produce less mature responses (i.e., different verb and adjectival) and fewer mature responses (periphrastics and passives) compared to children of the same age comparison (AC).
In English, children need to be able to organize verbs into three separate syntactic groups in order to properly use causative alternations.
These syntactic groups include: While children with SLI can typically use the lexical alternation for causative alternation as well as AC children, they tend to have difficulty using the syntactic cues to deal with verbs with fixed transitivity.
[21] In many Indo-European languages, causative alternation regularly involves the use of a reflexive pronoun, clitic, or affix in the inchoative use of the verb.
[24] French is another language that has them, developed from lack of distinguished sense in Gallo-Roman Vulgar Latin: However, note that the use of the reflexive form of the verb to express the anticausative meaning is more common.
"Note the use of the reflexive pronoun "se" in (11), which is required for the sentence to be grammatically correct in French.
Italian is another Romance language that, like French, incorporates the use of a reflexive pronoun with a verb's inchoative form.
"[3]Note the use of the reflexive pronoun "si" in (13), which behaves in the same manner as the French "se" shown in example (11).
It is common for languages to use a reflexive marker to signal the inchoative member of an alternating pair of verbs.
"[25]Note the use of the reflexive pronoun "sich" in (17), which behaves in the same manner as French "se" and Italian "si" seen above in examples (11) and (13).
In Dutch, labile verbs are used in a way similar to English, but they stand out as more distinct particularly in the perfect tenses.
"The door goes open"), while the former would be stated as "De marine liet het schip zinken" (lit.
A difference between Dutch and English is that typically the perfect tenses of intransitives take zijn (to be) as their auxiliary rather than hebben (to have), and this extends to these verbs as well.
In many languages the causative object would take a case such as the genitive, but in Dutch this is no longer the case: The perfect usually takes to be regardless of the objects: The labile verbs in Norwegian have one conjugation pattern for the transitive form and another for the intransitive form: Hebrew does have a few labile verbs, due in part to calques from other languages; nonetheless, it has fewer labile verbs than English, in part because it has a fairly productive causative construction and partly distinct mediopassive constructions.
"[27][full citation needed]Mandarin Chinese is a language that lacks inflectional morphology that marks tense, case, agreement, or lexical category.
*老张LaozhangLaozhang碎了sui-lebreak-PRT窗子.chuangzi.window*老张 碎了 窗子.Laozhang sui-le chuangzi.Laozhang break-PRT windowIntended meaning: 'Laozhang broke the window.'老张LaozhangLaozhang打碎了da-sui-lehit-break-PRT窗子chuangziwindow/老张/Laozhang 把窗子ba-chuangzi 打碎了.da-sui-le.
In (23), there is no action that Laozhang performed to cause the window to break, making this sentence ungrammatical.
경찰은gyeongchareunpolice-TOP철수를cheolsureulCheolsu-ACC죽였습니다.jugyeotseumnidadied-made경찰은 철수를 죽였습니다.gyeongchareun cheolsureul jugyeotseumnidapolice-TOP Cheolsu-ACC died-made"The police killed (made dead) Cheolsu.
