We discuss the recent proposal by Koontz-Garboden (2009) (cf. also Chierchia 2004) that reflexively marked anticausative verbs (in Romance languages and beyond) are semantically reflexive. This proposal predicts that a sentence headed by a lexical causative verb should not entail the sentence headed by the reflexively marked anticausative counterpart. We uncover problems with the main argument for this claim and add further tests which show that a causative sentence does, in fact, entail its anticausative counterpart, whether reflexively marked or not. Our findings support standard semantics of the causative alternation according to which anticausatives, whether reflexively marked or not, denote inchoative one-place predicates. They also reconfirm that the relevant reflexive morphology is syncretic and does not necessarily derive reflexive semantics.
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Koontz-Garboden, Andrew
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Reinhart, Tanya
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Boneh, Nora & Léa Nash
2017. The syntax and semantics of dative DPs in Russian ditransitives. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 35:4 ► pp. 899 ff.
Caha, Pavel, Karen De Clercq & Guido Vanden Wyngaerd
2023. Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 42:1 ► pp. 35 ff.
Fraser, Katherine
2019. The Athlete Tore a Muscle: English Locative Subjects in the Extra Argument Construction. In Language, Logic, and Computation [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11456], ► pp. 128 ff.
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