Anticausative verb


An anticausative verb is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event. The single argument of the anticausative verb is a patient, that is, what undergoes an action. One can assume that there is a cause or an agent of causation, but the syntactic structure of the anticausative makes it unnatural or impossible to refer to it directly. Examples of anticausative verbs are break, sink, move, etc.
Anticausative verbs are a subset of unaccusative verbs. Although the terms are generally synonymous, some unaccusative verbs are more obviously anticausative, while others are not; it depends on whether causation is defined as having to do with an animate volitional agent.
A distinction must be made between anticausative and autocausative verbs. A verb is anticausative if the agent is unspecified but assumed to be external, and it is autocausative if the agent is the same as the patient. Many Indo-European languages lack separate morphological markings for these two classes, and the correct class needs to be derived from context:
  • Anticausative: Vežimėlis atsirišo nuo krūmo.
  • Autocausative: Arklys atsirišo nuo krūmo.
  • Anticausative: Чашка упала со стола и разбилась.
  • Autocausative: Водитель разбился на горной дороге.

Examples

English

In English, many anticausatives are of the class of "alternating ambitransitive verbs", where the alternation between transitive and intransitive forms produces a change of the position of the patient role. This phenomenon is called causative alternation. For example:
  • He broke the window. → The window broke.
  • Some pirates sank the ship. → The ship sank.
Passive voice is not an anticausative construction. In passive voice, the agent of causation is demoted from its position as a core argument, but it can optionally be re-introduced using an adjunct. In the examples above, The window was broken, The ship was sunk would clearly indicate causation, though without making it explicit.

Romance languages

In the Romance languages, many anticausative verbs are formed through a pseudo-reflexive construction, using a clitic pronoun applied on a transitive verb. For example :
  • El vidrio se quebró.
  • Se está hundiendo el barco. or El barco se está hundiendo. or El barco está hundiéndose.
Another example in French:
  • Les poissons se pêchaient et se vendaient.

Slavic languages

In the Slavic languages, the use is essentially the same as in the Romance languages. For example :
  • Staklo se razbilo.
In East Slavic languages, the pronoun becomes postfix .
  • Стекло разбилось.
  • Речка разливается.
The suffix has a large number of uses and does not necessarily denote anticausativity. However, in most cases it denotes either passive voice or one of the subclasses of reflexivity
There is a class of verbs. These are commonly anticausative or autocausative, and commonly refer to emotions, behavior, or factors outside one's control.
  • Иван надеется поступить в университет.
  • Остановка автобуса оказалась рядом с нашей гостиницей.
In addition, a verb may be put into an unaccusative/anticausative form by forming an impersonal sentence, with the verb typically either in its past tense neuter form, or in its present tense third person form:
  • Штирлица тянуло на родину. Literally,
  • Из окна дуло. Literally, Note that the verb has neither agent nor patient, and therefore has valency zero: it is in the impersonal passive voice.
Here as well there is a class of "impersonal verbs", which only exist in this impersonal form:
  • Ивана тошнит. Literally, The verb тошнить has no standard personal form. Instead of *Эта рыба меня тошнит, to say, one must say От этой рыбы меня тошнит , where is not but something that remains unspecified.
  • Мне везёт в картах. Literally,

Arabic

In the Arabic language, the form VII has the anticausative meaning. For example, يَنْقَلِبُ⁩ means .

Urdu

uses a large number of antiaccusative verbs.
  • کھانا پک رہا ہے
  • پانی ابل رہا ہے

Ainu

In Ainu, there are two types of affixes that corresponding to the meaning of "by one's self", si- and yay-. The former is sometimes analyzed as anticausative and the latter is reflexive.

Japanese

In Standard Japanese, productive morphology highly favors transitivization, in the sense that it has productive causativization, but no anticausativization. In the Hokkaido dialects and Northern Tōhoku dialect, however, the anticausative morpheme is employed with some verbs, such as , , and as a means of producing an intransitive verb from a transitive verb.

Bardi

is an Australian Aboriginal language in the Nyulnyulan family which uses the root -jiidi- to denote anticausatives as part of complex predicate constructions. For example, whereas one might causatively 'close' a door with the following construction:
  • boonda - ma -
a door might 'close' with the following construction
  • boonda - jiidi -
In the underived construction, the light verb -ma- is used with a coverb boonda. In the anticausative construction, the light verb reduces the valency of the predicate and the item which is closed becomes the subject. This is a regular alternation among complex predicates.

Turkish

When an anticausative verb is used, the thing that is acted upon is placed as if it is the subject. Turkish converts the verb to an anticausative most commonly by the suffixes -l and -n.
  • Kapıyı açtı. takes the accusative suffix here.
  • Kapı açıldı.