The causative–anticausative alternation in Jordanian Arabic (JA)

Abstract

The current study aims to provide a description of the causative-anticausative alternation in Jordanian Arabic (henceforth, JA), focusing on the structural, morphological and semantic characteristics of causative and anticausative verbs. I adopt a non-derivational approach (i.e. the common-base approach), in which the two variants share a single root to account for the alternation in JA. The fact that JA exhibits two processes, i.e. causativisation and anticausativisation, with distinct morphological markings, provides evidence that neither a causativisation analysis nor an anticausativisation one accounts for the behaviour of verbs in JA. The analysis shows that the causative alternation in JA could be morphologically and semantically constrained. The constraints proposed for the causative alternation in JA may equally apply to other varieties of Arabic such as Standard Arabic, Iraqi Arabic and Libyan Arabic. The main difference between JA and other varieties of Arabic in terms of the causative alternation lies in the morphological markings on some verbs. Investigation of the mechanisms for the causative alternation in Arabic is relatively new and this work sheds additional light on the morphological coding and the semantic constraints governing these mechanisms.