This book is an exploration of the syntax of external arguments in transitivity alternations from a cross-linguistic perspective. The empirical focus is the causative/anticausative alternation and the formation of (adjectival) Passives. The bulk of the discussion, couched within Distributed Morphology, is devoted to the properties of the (anti-)causative alternation, which the text takes to be a Voice alternation. It offers a detailed discussion of the morphological realization of anticausatives across languages, and argues that marked anticausatives involve expletive Voice and are not reflexive predicates. In the discussion of Passives, the book argues that the fact that Passives in German and English—unlike their counterparts in Greek, where Passives are syncretic with anticausatives—are morphologically unique reflects the fact that they are also structurally unique. Passives in English and German involve Passive Voice, while they involve Middle Voice in Greek. The text furthermore shows that the distinction between target and resultant state participles is an important one in order to understand the contribution of Voice in adjectival Passives. Importantly, the study provided tools to probe into the morpho-syntactic structure of verbs and participles, and to identify the properties of verbal alternations across languages.

GoalsThe causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly 'cause to Vintransitive' (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar.Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative/anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative/anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS 1 Versions of this paper were presented at the XXXI Incontro di Grammatica Generativa in Rome (February 2005), at the 28th GLOW Colloquium in Geneva (April 2005), at the Linguistics Seminar at the University of Venice (May 2005), at the CGSW 20 at the University of Tilburg (June 2005) and at the 36th NELS conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (October 2005). We would like to thank these audiences and an anonymous reviewer for comments and discussion.

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