Transitive alternations in Russian: in the case of labile verbs

Abstract

Labile verbs are verbs that can be either transitive or intransitive. They are divided into A-labile verbs and P-labile verbs. A-labile verb in transitive and intransitive uses has a syntactic argument with semantic role of agent. And the P-labile verb in both uses has an argument with semantic role of patient. As labile alternation is considered as one of the causative alternations, we mainly analyze Plabile verbs in this paper. Labile alternation can occur in the direction from transitive to intransitive verb or from intransitive to transitive. In the first case, labile alternation is accompanied by the omission of agent-subject and the movement of patient to the place of subject. In the second case, it is made by lowering patientsubject to object’s position and adding a new argument-agent to the subject s position. Labile alternation expresses a change of valency, therefore it is directly related to other types of causative alternations, in particular, causative and anti-causative alternations. Since Russian has an anti-causative indicator –sja, in the Russian colloquial occasional labile alternation occurs more often in the causative zone, i.e. the direction from intransitive to transitive.