LingLunch : De Clercq, Caha & Van den Wyngaerd

Karen De Clercq, Pavel Caha (Masaryk University) and Guido Van den Wyngaerd (KU Leuven):
Causative-inchoative alternations in Nanosyntax

1. Claims. We look at the derivational triplet ADJECTIVE-INCHOATIVE VERB-CAUSATIVE VERB, defending the following claims.
• the verb contains the adjective
• the causative contains the inchoative
• ‘zero affixes’ are not needed
• ‘silent’ meaning components are pronounced cumulatively within overt morphemes
(phrasal spellout)

2. Data. In English there are two types of verbs based on adjectives. One type is identical to the adjective (1a), the other has the adjective suffixed, see (1b,c).

(1) a. cool b. tighten c. solidify narrow widen prettify
open shorten simplify

All these verbs have both an inchoative and a causative sense:

(2)
a. The road narrowed b. Her stomach tightened c. The mixture solidified
d. The workers narrowed the road
e. She tightened the lid
f. The company solidified its position

3. Analysis. We take the overt suffixes to realise two abstract heads, PROC (for PROCESS) and INIT (for INITIATOR); see Ramchand (2008).

(3) [ INIT [ PROC ]] ⇔ /-en, -ify/

(3) instantiates phrasal spellout: a complex node with two abstract heads is realised by a single morpheme. Our account extends this idea to the verbs in (1a). We give them the lexical entry (4), which makes them capable of realising all the meaning components.

(4) [ INIT [ PROC [ A ] ]] ⇔ /cool, narrow, ... /

The three-way ambiguity between the inchoative or causative verb and adjective falls out as a consequence of the Superset Principle (Starke 2009), which says that a lexical entry can spell out any subtree which it contains. Both the inchoative sense and the adjective sense corresponds to proper parts of (4), and we therefore derive these readings without the need to postulate zeroes.

References
Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Verb meaning and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Starke, Michal. 2009. Nanosyntax: A short primer to a new approach to language. Nordlyd 36. 1–6.