Abstract
This paper investigates the non-culminating, zero change-of-state construal of causative accomplishment verbs as well as its origin in Indonesian in order to shed light on the event/conceptual structure of this verb class. The paper first presents novel data illustrating that this construal is possible with an agentive subject, but not with a causer subject, thereby lending support to the Agent Control Hypothesis (Demirdache and Martin 2015), which is known to regulate the relationship between agentivity and non-culmination. The paper then addresses the question of why Indonesian exhibits this agentive-sensitive distribution of the non-culminating interpretation. This fact is argued to follow from a close interaction of Martin’s (2019) event-tokenization theory of two types of causation with the maximality requirement of the weak perfective operator (Altshuler 2014) independently developed for languages such as Thai, Hindi and Chinese. The proposed analysis receives support from time-frame adverbials and different interpretations imposed on VP complementation under aspectual predicates.
Highlights
Over the last five years or so, there has emerged an important crosslinguistically salient generalization regarding a particular interpretation of causative accomplishment verbs, captured under the name of the Agent Control Hypothesis (ACH) (Demirdache and Martin 2015; Martin 2015, 2019)
Martin’s central hypothesis is that causation comes in two types depending on the agentivity of the external argument: the agentive causation type is understood in terms of two sub-event tokens: the agent’s action and the theme’s CoS whereas the non-agentive causation type is understood only in terms of the theme’s CoS just as in anti-causative/inchoative constructions
I have demonstrated how this difference interacts with the maximality requirement of the partitive perfective operator PFVM to yield the ACH effects in Indonesian, namely, the availability of the non-culminating, zero CoS construal with agent subjects, but not with causer subjects
Summary
Over the last five years or so, there has emerged an important crosslinguistically salient generalization regarding a particular interpretation of causative accomplishment verbs, captured under the name of the Agent Control Hypothesis (ACH) (Demirdache and Martin 2015; Martin 2015, 2019). I have shown in this subsection how Martin’s (2019) event-tokenization theory of two causation types interacts with the partitive perfective operator PFVM in Indonesian to yields the agent-sensitive distribution of the non-culminating, zero CoS reading of causative accomplishment verbs in the language as predicted by the ACH. No change on the part of the fish developing toward the intended result (i.e., the fish got burned) has to happen yet at the utterance time; the fish may remain exactly in the same shape/color as before This construal is possible in (28) precisely because this agentive causative example involves the agent’s action and the theme’s CoS as its sub-event tokens. (Observing B reaching his right hand into his pocket in front of the door of his house) Ada apa? exist what ‘What is happening?’
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