Crackers

[David Gil]

Andrew Koontz-Garboden wrote:
> Can you get the transitive uses of crack with natural force subjects
> in Hebrew and German?  E.g., The earthquake cracked the mirror. ?
>   
Not in Hebrew.
> There's a great paper by McKoon and Macfarland in Language 2000 that
> shows that, at least in English, with internally caused COS verbs
> (which perhaps German and Hebrew 'crack' are?  There are diagnostics
> that can be used to test...), although agentive transitive uses are
> very rare in naturally occurring uses, transitive uses with a
> non-agentive causer are not at all uncommon.
>   
-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/