Volume 52, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Typology of Labile Verbs: Focus on Diachrony

Internally caused change-of-state verbs have recently been established as alternating verbs in languages such as English and Greek, thus becoming an important component of any analysis of the causative alternation. Generally, this type of alternation qualifies as a labile one, as in both intransitive and transitive uses of such verbs the same form is used. The behavior of internally caused change-of-state verbs in the causative alternation, however, differs radically from that of verbs such as open , as they split into two subclasses: one that predominantly takes causer subjects ( blossom ), and one that behaves like open ( ferment ), being able to take agentive subjects as well. In this paper, I investigate the properties of internally caused change-of-state verbs in English and Greek, and offer an analysis thereof adopting the syntactic decomposition of causative predicates put forth in Alexiadou et al. (2006, in press), according to which the causative alternation is a Voice alternation. I argue that the subject of the transitive variant of internally caused change-of-state verbs of the ferment class is introduced in Spec,VoiceP, and as a result it is not thematically restricted to the role of causer. The subject of the blossom class is introduced in vP and thus is restricted to the causer role. This difference between the two classes of internally caused verbs change-of-state is reflected also in the impossibility of the blossom class to undergo passivization.

The study of P-lability in languages in which the relationship between transitive and intransitive predication can be characterized as radical P-alignment must take into account the formal distinction between weak and strong lability, and the semantic distinction between argument structure modifying and argument structure preserving lability. Radical P-alignment is particularly common among Daghestanian languages in which some authors operating with a loose definition of P-lability have argued that P-lability is pervasive, whereas others have argued that, in the same languages, P-lability is exceptional. On the basis of more precise definitions, it is shown that, in the languages in question, all transitive verbs exhibit a behavior whose characterization as a type of lability may be controversial, depending on the definition of lability, whereas some of them only show a behavior that stands closer to prototypical lability. This paper argues that the observation of causativization is particularly relevant to the analysis of lability in such languages.

The paper discusses the phenomenon of Late Latin intransitivizations, where a morphologically active form of a transitive verb is used with a middle-passive function. Intransitivizations are present throughout the history of the language, but their number increases significantly in the 3rd–4th century CE. They are instances of patient-preserving lability and represent one of the possible means to express the anticausative alternation. The analysis casts intransitivizations into the broader context of voice fluctuations in Late Latin, by comparing them with competing constructions and by examining the possible causes for their increase in frequency during the Late Latin stage.

This paper describes the diachronic development of labile verbs in the French causative-anticausative alternation. The aim is to show that the development is best described with the notion of persistence (defined as “endurance under competition”). In the first part of the paper I will show that French labile verbs indeed had (and still have) a serious competitor, viz. the reflexively marked anticausative. While mostly labile verbs were used to encode the alternation in 12th century Old French, in present-day French the pattern with a formally derived anticausative dominates. In the second part of the paper I will focus on the second aspect of the notion persistence and provide the following empirical evidence for the endurance of the labile pattern: (i) the high number of labile verbs used to express the alternation in present-day French, (ii) labile verbs in the French causative-anticausative alternation are not just remnants from an older stage of the language, (iii) the decrease in lability is a very slow process, and (iv) unmarked anticausatives still appear in the same semantic contexts as reflexive anticausatives.

This paper considers labile verbs , i.e., verbs that use the same morphology for the causative and the anticausative reading, and how this lability pattern has evolved and spread in relation to case alignment and, specifically, to the lack of case distinctions between the nominative and the accusative with neuter DPs. In the first part of the study, we examine the voice distinctions in the history of the Greek language, showing that the use of the same voice morphology (i.e., active) for causative and anticausative readings increases in Hellenistic Greek and spreads progressively until Early Modern Greek, as indicated by empirical evidence in dialectal texts. The second part of the study attributes this pattern to the lack of the nominative-accusative case distinction in neuter nouns that in turn can be interpreted as either objects of a transitive (causative) verb or subjects of an intransitive verb (anticausative). In this aspect, neuter nouns demonstrate a type of split ergativity in the Greek labile alternations which thus require a split ergativity analysis based on DP features.

This paper examines the phenomenon of lability in Estonian. We describe the types of lability found in our database and the distribution of verbs according to formal (derivational) and semantic verb classes, and we propose an explanation for the spread of lability in the Estonian verbal lexicon. Estonian displays a wealth of labile verbs, compared with Finnish, for instance, a closely related language which uses similar (derivational and morphosyntactic) valency changing devices. We argue that Estonian lability has been co-conditioned by the following factors: a) intensive contact with German, a language rich in labile verbs, b) fluctuations in the productivity and regularity of the valency-decreasing derivation in the recent history of Estonian, c) the phonetic merger of different derivational suffixes leading to misinterpretation of the valency patterns of their derivatives, and d) form-driven analogy. In relation to the last factor we introduce the notion of “clustered lability,” which designates the expansion of the labile pattern over verbs sharing the same root.

The paper is devoted to the labile verbs in the Middle Indo-Aryan languages. To begin with, the general causes of the diachronic development of lability are taken into consideration. The main such cause is suggested to be the casual diachronic deletion of the valency changing morphemes. In this respect, the valency changing verbal morphology of late Sanskrit, along with its outcome at the Middle Indian stage, is taken into consideration. All of the possible sources of ambiguity are identified. Subsequently, it is shown how these ambiguities effectively brought about the creation of labile patterns, which are indeed attested in our sources in MIA languages (namely, literary and epigraphic Prakrits, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Pāli). At the end, some indirect traces of labile verbs in MIA languages are hypothesized through the analysis of the writings of the Pāṇinian grammarians.

The ancient Indo-European languages, such as early Vedic or (Homeric) Greek, are usually considered to be characterized by a high degree of lability. According to the communis opinio , they had a considerable number of labile verbs or verbal forms that could be labile, cf. rudrā॔ r̥tásya sádaneṣu vāvr̥dhuḥ ‘Rudras have grown [intransitive] in the residences of the truth’ ~ índram ukthā॔ni vāvr̥dhuḥ ‘The hymns have increased [transitive] Indra’. This paper offers a general overview of the Vedic verbal forms for which labile patterning is attested. I will argue that, for most of these forms, the secondary character of lability can be demonstrated. Thus, for many labile forms with middle inflection (in particular, forms belonging to the present system), labile patterning results from the polyfunctionality of the middle diathesis (self-beneficent / anticausative). The secondary transitive usages of some fundamentally intransitive verbs such as puṣyati ‘prospers; makes prosper’ originates from the syntactic re-analysis of content accusative constructions of the type ‘X prospers (in) Y’→‘X makes Y prosper’. I will further demonstrate that, within the Old Indo-Aryan period, we observe the decline of the labile type. Already in the second most ancient Vedic text, the Atharvaveda, we find very few labile forms. Thus, most of the active perfects which show labile syntax in the Rgveda are either attested in intransitive usages only, or in transitive usages only, or do not occur at all. I will also discuss the main mechanisms of the loss of labile pattern in Old Indo-Aryan.