[Lingtyp] Passive vs. anticausative

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Tim – In the CAL project<https://causalityacrosslanguages.wordpress.com/>, we’ve been treating constructions such as your (7) as involving what we call ‘non-sentential causer adjuncts’ (NCRAs). They appear to be common across languages, but in our sample only ever seem to show up as a bit of a niche strategy. Unsurprisingly, they seem to have a semantic affinity for natural force causers. Below you can see a conditional inference model for the English NCRA construction based on acceptability rating data. NCRr = Natural force causer; Mediation = presence of an intermediate agent/subevent; ContrHCEAF = the second participant in the causal chain exerts control over the induced action/activity. The numbers on the leaves mean that the construction is acceptable with natural force causers 94% of the time, etc. – Best – Juergen

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Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Tim Ongenae via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Thursday, October 31, 2024 at 12:26
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Passive vs. anticausative
Dear colleagues,

I have a question related to the distinction between passive and anticausative, which is quite important to understand my (diachronic) data on anticausativization in Latin. Latin has three anticausative strategies:
1/ the mediopassive strategy, in which there is voice syncretism between anticausative and passive. This strategy is clearly in decline in later periods of Latin.
(1)   porta             aperitur
      door.nom    open.mpass
      “The door opens” or “The door is opened.”
2/ the reflexive strategy (which is, however, more frequent in agentive anticausatives, or autocausatives and not so much in decausatives / non-agentive anticausatives)
(2)   porta             se          aperit
      door.nom    refl.acc    open.act
      “The door opens.”
3/ the labile strategy (the active intransitive)
(3)   porta       aperit
      door.nom    open.act
A clear functional distinction between passive and anticausative is necessary to understand it. For the mediopassive, I draw a distinction based on agentivity in my data analysis (external Agent present in context = passive; external Agent not present in context = anticausative), which is important to understand the mediopassive. However, in Latin there is also the possibility to replace the Agent with an Instrument or a Cause in the transitive alternant of verbs that can undergo anticausativization (cfr. Effector as defined by Van Valin & Wilkins 1996), as in the following examples:
(4)   I open the window. (I = Agent)
(5)   The hammer opens the window. (The hammer = Instrument)
(6)   The wind opens the window. (The wind = Cause)
Example (6) in detransitivization could give example (7) in English. In Latin, I have noticed that in these contexts both the labile and mediopassive strategies could be used (although there seems to be a lexical distinction between more ‘spontaneous’ events preferring lability and less ‘spontaneous’ events preferring the mediopassive). Furthermore, my preliminary analysis suggests that lability is becoming more frequent in Late Latin, but only in contexts without a cause. In Zúñiga and Kittilä (2019), constructions similar to (7) were treated as non-prototypical anticausatives (Inanimate Causer Constructions), but, at least in Latin, I have the feeling that these constructions are somewhere between passives and anticausatives.
(7)   a. The window opens from the wind.
      b. The window is opened by the wind.

My question is the following: do you have knowledge about the encoding of examples like (7) in the language(s) you are studying? Are they treated as an anticausative, as a passive or as something else? If you happen to know of any secondary literature on this, I would be very grateful as well!

Many thanks in advance!

Kind regards,
Tim

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