Abstract
The first part of the present article concentrates on noncausal/causal pairs whose noncausal member is a monovalent verb referring to a process typically undergone by concrete inanimate entities. The cross-linguistic variation in the coding of such pairs is analyzed in a convenience sample of 30 sub-Saharan languages from various genetic units. 10 of the 30 languages show an extremely high degree of preference for the ambitransitivity strategy in the coding of this particular type of noncausal/causal pairs, whereas none of them shows such a high degree of preference for any of the other possible strategies. The second part of the article concentrates on the 10 languages of the sample making a systematic use of the ambitransitivity strategy for the type of noncausal/causal pairs investigated in the first part of the article. It analyzes the extension of the ambitransitivity strategy to the coding of other semantic types of noncausal/causal pairs and to the coding of the psych alternation. In the questionnaire used to test the extension of the ambitransitivity strategy, a sizeable proportion of ambitransitive pairs is found in only three languages. In the others, the lack of any systematicity is the situation that predominates for the semantic types of noncausal/causal pairs other than that investigated in the first part of the article and for pairs of psych verbs.
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