Abstract
AbstractThis chapter summarizes our results. This study analyzes the properties of the (anti-)causative alternation, which is viewed as a Voice alternation. Anticausatives do not differ from causatives in event complexity, but only in that the latter contain a thematic Voice head, which the former lack. A further important proposal made is that there are three non-active heads involved in argument alternations: expletive, Middle, and Passive. This suggests that morphology provides us with an important tool to understand syncretism: from our perspective, Voice syncretisms (more particularly, syncretisms involving Voice heads) are expected to emerge in languages that make use of the Middle Voice head. It furthermore showed that the distinction between target state and resultant state participles is important in understanding the contribution of Voice. Importantly, the study provided tools to probe into the morpho-syntactic structure of verbs and participles, and to identify the properties of verbal alternations across languages.
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