The probability of external causation
An empirical account of crosslinguistic variation in lexical causatives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7913631 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tanja Samardzic (0000-0003-2381-013X, University of Zurich), Paola Merlo (0000-0001-6363-4498, University of Geneva, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 895-938 |
| Publication date | 2018-08-28 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ling-2018-0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2889313223 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 21 |
This corpus-driven computational study addresses the question of why some verbs in some languages participate in the causative alternation while their counterparts in other languages do not. The results of this study suggest that the lexical property that underlies this variation is the probability of external causation. Alternating verbs are distributed on a scale of increasing probability for an external causer to occur. The probability of external causation can be empirically assessed in two ways, among others: first, by observing the typological distribution of causative and anticausative morphological markings across a wide range of languages; second, through the frequency distribution of causative and anticausative uses of the alternating verbs in a corpus of a single language. Our study reveals that these two measures are correlated. Moreover, we demonstrate that the corpus-based measure is applicable to a wide range of verbs. Extending the corpus-based investigation comparatively across two languages, English and German, we find that the frequencies of crosslinguistic realizations of lexical causatives are modulated by the probability of external causation, an underlying parameter assigned to verb types. Finally, we propose a probabilistic graphical model that clusters verbs based on the relation between the crosslinguistic distribution of their causative and anticausative realizations and the probability of external causation
Alternation (linguistics) · Causation · Causative · German · Linguistics · Modal verb · Natural language processing · Probabilistic logic · Probability distribution · Statistics · Variation (astronomy) · Verb · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
The Acquisition of Causative Alternation in Mandarin Chinese
Corpus-based typology
Anticausativization and lability in Late Latin
El vaso se rompió? Factores léxicos y contextuales en la alternanciacausativa
Semantic roles and the causative-anticausative alternation
Reflexive and unmarked anticausatives in French and Spanish
More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations
Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data Via the EM Algorithm
The Theta System – an overview
A Systematic Comparison of Various Statistical Alignment Models
Automatic Verb Classification Based on Statistical Distributions of Argument Structure
Anticausativization
Causalness and the encoding of the causative–anticausative alternation in French and Spanish
Coding causal–noncausal verb alternations
The syntactic construction of two non-active Voices
The Proposition Bank
Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries
Anticausatives
The problem with internally caused change-of-state verbs
Lexical content and context
A preliminary analysis of causative verbs in English
Clause Structure and Verb Series
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,86 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |