Transitivization, causative constructions, and the thematic-licensing of external arguments

Bibliographic Data

ID22159512
AuthorsHazel Mitchley (Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume7
Issue1
Pages5244
Publication date2022-05-05
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueProceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2473-8689 • E-ISSN: 2473-8689
PublisherLinguistic Society of America (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5244
OpenAlexW4229036813
LanguageEN
References cited8

I argue that the head responsible for thematically licensing the external argument is neither Voice nor v, but instead a distinct θ-licensing head, L, which intervenes between Voice and v. Evidence comes from Kinande, where I show that the 'lexical causative' is not v, Voice, or a Cause head which introduces an event -- it is purely a θ-licensor. I then turn to Kinande's productive causative constructions, and show that in causatives of transitive verbs the Cause head embeds a complement which includes agentive semantics (i.e. it embeds the head which θ-licenses the external argument of the caused event), but the complement nonetheless does not include the VoiceP phase. I ultimately argue for a bifurcation of what is traditionally understood as VoiceP into two distinct phrases: a θ-Licensing Phrase (LP), where the θ-role for the external argument is introduced, and VoiceP, which is the locus of the phase boundary, and is where the external argument merges

Causative · Combinatorics · Event structure · Linguistics · Phrase · Physics · Transitive relation · Verb · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Mathematics · Medicine · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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