SIL talk by Marijana Marelj (UU) & Ora Matushansky (CNRS/U. Paris 8)

 SLAVIC DEADJECTIVAL UNCAUSATIVES AND DECAUSATIVES

 Deadjectival degree achievements in Slavic come in two varieties, distinguished both by their thematic suffix (-e– vs. –i-) and by their syntax (intransitive vs. transitive), as in (1), where e-verbs are systematically intransitive (& unaccusative), while i-verbs are transitive.

(1) a. zjasnět ‘to become clear’/zjasnit ‘to make clear’ (Czech, Caha et al. 2023)

b. głupieć ‘to get stupid’/głupić ‘to make stupid’ (Polish, Jabłońska 2007:109)

c. veselity ‘to become merrier’/veselyty ‘to make merrier’ (Ukr., Vyshnevska 2025:174)

d. otupeti ‘to become blunt, numb’/otupiti ‘to make blunt’ (Serbo-Croatian)

e. pʲanetʲ ‘to become drunk, intoxicated’, pʲanitʲ ‘to intoxicate’ (Russian)

f. rumeneti ‘to become yellow’/rumeniti ‘to make yellow’ (Slovenian, Marvin 2002:100)

 We will argue that i-verbs are not derived from e-verbs (contra Wyngaerd et al. 2022, Caha et al. 2023), nor vice versa, providing evidence for two types of unaccusatives (Alexiadou 2010, Labelle & Doron 2010) not sharing a common core. Two distinct types of evidence will be provided: (i) We will show that i-verbs have SE-marked decausative intransitive counterparts (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1994, 1995, Chierchia 2004, Reinhart 2016, but also Harley 1995, 2008, 2012, Doron 2003a, b), which are morphologically distinct from e-verbs (2), and (ii) We will argue that i-verbs are result-oriented (telic), while e-verbs are process-oriented (atelic), linking their juxtaposition to the marked vs. unmarked anticausative contrast in French (3) from Zribi-Hertz 1987, Labelle 1992, Legendre & Smolensky 2009, Labelle & Doron 2010, etc.

(2) a. Russian: suzitʲ ‘to make narrower’PFV/suzitʲsʲa/ ‘to become narrower’PFV

b. Serbo-Croatian: suziti (se) ‘to make/become narrower’PFV

 (3) French:

a. La branche s’est cassée.

the branch SE.is broken

‘The branch broke.’ 

b. La branche a cassé.

the branch has broken

‘The branch broke.’

 REFERENCES 

Alexiadou, Artemis. 2010. On the morphosyntax of (anti)causative verbs. In Rappaport Hovav, Malka & Doron, Edit & Sichel, Ivy (eds.). Lexical Semantics, Syntax, and Event Structure, 177–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199544325.003.0009. 

Caha, Pavel & De Clercq, Karen & Vanden Wyngaerd, Guido. 2023. Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 42 (1), 35–62. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2022-2012. 

Chierchia, Gennaro. 2004. A semantics for unaccusatives and its syntactic consequences. In Alexiadou, Artemis & Anagnostopoulou, Elena & Everaert, Martin (eds.). The Unaccusativity Puzzle, 22–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Doron, Edit. 2003a. Agency and voice: the semantics of the Semitic templates. Natural Language Semantics 11 (1), 1–67. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023021423453. 

Doron, Edit. 2003b. Transitivity alternations in the Semitic template system. In Jacqueline, Lecarme (ed.). Research in Afroasiatic Grammar II, 127–149. John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.241.09dor. 

Harley, Heidi. 1995. Subjects, Events and Licensing. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. 

Harley, Heidi. 2008. On the causative construction. In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, ed. by Miyagawa, Shigeru, 20–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195307344.013.0002.

Harley, Heidi. 2012. Lexical decomposition in modern syntactic theory. In The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality, ed. by Hinzen, Wolfram & Machery, Edouard & Werning, Markus, 328–350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199541072.013.0015. 

Jabłońska, Patrycja. 2007. Radical decomposition and argument structure. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tromsø. 

Labelle, Marie. 1992. Change of state and valency. Journal of Linguistics 28 (2), 375–414. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226700015267. 

Labelle, Marie & Doron, Edit. 2010. Anticausative derivations (and other valency alternations) in French. 22 (2), 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1515/prbs.2010.011. 

Legendre, Géraldine & Smolensky, Paul. 2009. French inchoatives and the Unaccusativity Hypothesis. In Hypothesis A / Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter, 229–246: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7670.003.0016. 

Levin, Beth & Rappaport Hovav, Malka. 1994. A preliminary analysis of causative verbs in English. Lingua 92, 35–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(94)90337-9. 

Levin, Beth & Rappaport Hovav, Malka. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 26. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 

Marvin, Tatjana. 2002. Topics in the stress and syntax of words. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. 

Reinhart, Tanya. 2016. The theta system: syntactic realization of verbal concepts. In Everaert, Martin & Marelj, Marijana & Reuland, Eric (eds.). Concepts, Syntax, and Their Interface Cambridge, Massuchusetts: MIT Press. 

Vyshnevska, Anastasiia. 2025. Comparative morphology across categories: Ukrainian adjectives, adverbs, and deadjectival verbs. Doctoral dissertation, KU Leuven. Amsterdam: LOT. 

Wyngaerd, Guido Vanden & De Clercq, Karen & Caha, Pavel. 2022. A nanosyntactic approach to Dutch deadjectival verbs. Linguistics in the Netherlands 39, 240–262. 

Zribi-Hertz, Anne. 1987. La réflexivité ergative en français moderne. Le français moderne 55, 23–54.