SEMANTIC DETERMINANTS OF VALENCE IN THE CAUSATIVE-INCHOATIVE ALTERNATION
SEMANTIC DETERMINANTS OF VALENCE IN THE CAUSATIVE-INCHOATIVE ALTERNATION

Summary/Abstract: This paper starts from the premise that the morphological marking on inchoative verbs can be semantically explained in that unmarked inchoatives were conceptualized by speakers as expressing spontaneous events (Haspelmath 1993). While the unmarkedness of the Romanian inchoatives that we analyze can assumably be explained by their primary meaning which refers to a spontaneous event in the world, we set out to investigate if the placement of the verb on the spontaneity scale (Haspelmath 2005) has a bearing on the acceptability of transitive variants of the verb. Apparently, transitive acceptability is also closely tied to meaning; it depends on the direct object argument selected by the verb and ultimately on the type of event expressed by the verb phrase. Importantly, the possibility to express a directly caused external event varies from verb to verb, and even for the same verb depending on the direct object or subject argument. Belonging to the internally caused class does not necessarily ban transitive acceptability, and being part of the automatic class does not freely license transitive uses.

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