Crackers

[Frans Plank]

Crackers


Consider the following relationship between a 
state, a change of state, and the causation of a 
change of state.

STATE
X was in a state of not being whole, being 
partially fractured though without the parts 
completely separate or without the whole 
completely destroyed
(where X is something, preferably an artefact, of 
brittle consistency, hard but breakable, such as 
vases or window panes made of glass, plates made 
of porcelain, earthenware, urns or tablets made 
of clay, walls made from dried cow-dung, etc.)

CHANGE OF STATE
X spontaneously, or at any rate without an 
animate agent acknowledged as causally involved, 
changed from a state of being whole to a state of 
not being whole, being partially fractured though 
without the parts completely separate or without 
the whole completely destroyed

CAUSATION
An animate agent caused a change of state of A 
from being whole to not being whole, being 
partially fractured though without the parts 
completely separate or without the whole 
completely destroyed


To exemplify this trias from English.

STATE
The vase had a crack.		(transitive verb of possession,
				with [deverbal???] noun as object) 
The vase was cracked.		(existential copula,
 
	stative-resultative participle of 
[intransitive, denominal???] verb)

CHANGE OF STATE
The vase cracked.			(same 
verb as for causation, used intransitively)

CAUSATION
Father cracked the vase.		(same 
verb as for change of state, used transitively)



And here's closely related German.

STATE
Die Vase hatte einen Sprung.		(transitive verb of possession,
				with deverbal noun as object)
Die Vase war gesprungen.		(existential copula,
 
	stative-resultative participle of 
[intransitive] verb)

CHANGE OF STATE
Die Vase sprang.			(intransitive verb, a verb of movement,
				literally 
designating a sudden spring from the ground)
Die Vase bekam einen Sprung.	(inchoative verb, lit. 'to get',
				with deverbal noun as object)

CAUSATION
---

Remarkably, though a native speaker, I find no 
way of expressing this straightforward state of 
affairs in German, other than in extremely 
roundabout ways ('Father was careless and did 
something to the vase that resulted in its having 
a crack', or such).  Neither the denominal noun 
Sprung nor some morphological or syntactic way of 
causativising the verb springen works (there is 
an old causative, sprengen, but that now means 
'cause to burst with a loud nose, explode'):

*Vater brachte der Vase einen Sprung bei.
*Vater sprang die Vase.  *Vater ließ die Vase springen.

The prefixal derivative zer-springen (with zer- a 
completive-destructive prefix) again is only 
intransitive and means 'to go to pieces';  and 
transitive zer-sprengen likewise means 'break up 
completely'.

At long last my question:

Is this gap in German unique?  Preliminary 
enquiries -- though of very limited 
crosslinguistic range -- suggest it is not.  Is 
it easy or difficult or impossible to express the 
concept 'to cause something to be cracked' in the 
language(s) that you speak or know well?

I find this gap somewhat worrying, from a 
practical as well as a theoretical point of view. 
I'd assume that brittle things frequently end up 
being cracked, in German-speaking lands no less 
than in English-speaking ones, and that 
spontaneous crackings (ice comes to mind here, as 
temperature rises) worldwide are overall far less 
frequent than cracks caused by the carelessness 
of human agents.  (If there is a difficulty with 
'to cause something to be cracked', it might 
therefore be to do with the semantics of 
transitivity rather than with frequency, a notion 
often invoked to account for the differential 
ease of expressibility of anything thinkable and 
sayable and in particular for the directionality 
of derivations of causatives or decausatives.)

I'd appreciate any feedback.

(And I'd like to gratefully acknowledge the 
unwitting input from Alex Tantos, discussing 
English crack at his thesis defence yesterday, if 
from the angle of Discourse Representation Theory 
and how it accounts for causation -- a really 
hard nut to crack.)

frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de
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