What is it about?
What factors are involved in triggering causal-noncausal verb alternations, such as: “The doorbell rang” => “Someone rang the doorbell” or “Someone banged the door” =>”The door banged”? This paper explains the issue not only in terms of usage frequency but also by taking a historical perspective on English sound-emission verbs.
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Why is it important?
In this article the author argues that for a linguistic pair there is a strong correlation in terms of frequency between form and earlier occurrence and thereby proposes the earlier occurrence – frequency correspondence principle, which not only provides good evidence for but also complements Haspelmath et al.’s (2014) form-frequency correspondence principle in that the former principle can account for the verb pairs that the latter principle cannot, in particular, English causal-noncausal verb pairs, which have the same verb form for the causal and the noncausal use. It is expected that the present analysis of causal-noncausal verb pairs based on the former principle can be applied mutatis mutandis (that is, if necessary changes are made while not affecting the main point at issue) to other kinds of verb or construction alternations as well. Thus, analyses adopting a historical perspective will shed new light on issues involving verb/construction alternations, interactions between alternations, and grammaticization.
Perspectives
Looking at language data from a new perspective is like looking at things from a different angle. Recall some famous “optical illusion pictures” which everyone has ever seen before. In one such picture the object inside looks like either the head of a rabbit looking leftward or the head of a duck looking rightward. In another picture called “wife and mother-in-law”, the person inside looks like either a young wife or aged mother-in-law. Which object in these pictures is conceived depends on which part(s) the viewer turns his/her attention to. Almost the same can be said of looking at language data. Adopting a historical perspective, the author has been able to see interesting other aspects of causal-noncausal verb pairs than otherwise.
Professor Emeritus Kazuko Inoue
Hiroshima Daigaku
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An explanation of causal-noncausal verb alternations in terms of frequency of use, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, December 2022, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/cogls.21004.ino.
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Resources
Explaining causal-noncausal alternations in terms of frequency of use: A corpus-based diachronic approach to English sound emission verbs.
Paper presented at ICLC 14 (the 14th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference), University of Tartu, Estonia, 10-14 July.
On Janus-headed intransitivity and the ergativization of the verb: A cognitive view based on English sound emission verbs.
Paper presented at CLDC 2014 (the 7th Conference on Landguage, Didcourse and Cognition), National Taiwan University, 3-4 May.
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