Why can’t the sun bloom roses in Spanish?
On the nature of some internally-caused changes of state
Levin and Rappaport (1995) have proposed a binary classification for change of state verbs that revolves around the locus of cause for these changes: whether the cause is internal or external to the entity undergoing change. They claim this distinction is crosslinguistically viable and explains the syntactic behavior of these predicates. Based on work done by Smith (1970) and Wright (2001), this paper argues for an extension of Levin and Rappaport’s binary classification. Instead, I propose a continuum resulting from the analysis of corpora in English and Spanish for verbs that would enter the binary categories advanced by Levin and Rappaport. One of the problematic pairs of verbs for their classification when applied to Spanish, florecer ‘to bloom’ and marchitar(se) ‘to wilt’ is analyzed in detail. The continuum proposed here extends Levin and Rappaport’s categories and takes into account the locus of control of the change and whether external factors may be necessary conditions for the change to occur. In particular, this new focus can account for the presence or absence of the clitic se with some of the predicates in Spanish.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
BENTLEY, DELIA
2024.
Internally caused change as change by inner predisposition: Comparative evidence from Romance.
Journal of Linguistics 60:3
► pp. 483 ff.
Abrines Llabrés, Bartomeu & Jaume Mateu Fontanals
2018.
Els verbs de canvi d'estat del català i l'alternança causativa: una proposta sintàctica.
Études romanes de Brno :1
► pp. 139 ff.
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