Search results for "causatives"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
On the semantic interpretation of complex causatives in Finnish: An experimental morphology approach
2009
It is well documented that in some languages, such as in Finnish, it is possible to stack derivational morphemes iteratively to word stems. However, such complex words are seldom used in real communication, and it is unclear whether they are interpreted compositionally in tandem with their morphological structure. Here I studied the matter by eliciting semantic interpretations from ten native speakers of Finnish for words whose complexity and morphemic content were systematically varied. The results show that although the frequency of semantic interpretation decreases linearly as a function of the number of morphemes in a word (contrary to the case of ungrammatical words where the semantic …
Unaccusativity
2012
Abstract My research is an attempt at suggesting a cross-linguistically valid definition of verbs characterized by unagentivity and affectedness such as “burn”, “die”, “sink”, “fall”, “slide”, etc., which according to the present analysis constitute the semantic core of unaccusativity. Both synchronic and diachronic approaches are followed. Various definitions have been attributed to these verbs (eventives, anticausatives, transformatives, inchoatives, decausatives). Although Perlmutter & Postal (1984) classify unaccusative verbs on the basis of their syntactic behavior, they also argue that the syntactic expression of arguments is always determinable on the basis of the meaning of the verb…