Introduction

We have seen that causativization is one of the important factors underlying verb alternations in English, and one which I have argued is built in to the interpretation of verbal decompositional structure in a fundamental way. In this chapter, I look more closely at the morphology associated with causativization in one language, Hindi/Urdu, which productively constructs transitive verbs from simpler, usually intransitive bases. The argument here will be that in accounting for the regular morphology and its syntactic/semantic consequences, we can get some justification for the abstract system of primitives being argued for in this book. At the same time, the comparison between English and Hindi/Urdu will allow us to formulate some specific hypotheses about the nature of parametric variation in constructing verbal meaning. The larger picture will be, firstly, that there is explicit evidence for decomposition from morphological and analytical constructions, and secondly, once again, that languages vary only in the ‘size’ of their lexical items, not in the fundamental building blocks of eventive meaning.

In chapter 4, I discussed the debate in the literature concerning the direction of the causative–inchoative alternation. Recall that Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995), Chierchia (2004) and Reinhart (2002) all agree in deriving the inchoative alternant from a lexically causative base. I argued in chapter 4 that the structure of the conceptual argument dissolves once one moves to a nonlexical, structure building framework. While the morphological evidence from some languages where the inchoative version of a verb transparently contains the verb itself plus a piece of ‘reflexivizing’ morphology (e.g. si in Italian, se in French, sja in Russian) seems to support a detransitivization story, typological work shows that this is not generally the case across languages (Haspelmath 1993).