9. The historical source of the bigrade transitivity alternations in Japanese

Macroscopic and microscopic typology: Basic Valence Orientation, more pertinacious than meets the naked eye

“…Elsewhere, Comrie (2006) finds that a causativisation preference has been diachronically very stable in other families, too, namely Semitic and Uralic; 39 similarly Narrog (2009) and, despite certain reservations, Frellesvig & Whitman (2012) for Japanese. Comparing two close Northeast Caucasian relatives, Creissels (2014) finds many more transitivisations among the diagnostic pairs of Nichols et al (2004) in Akhvakh than in Avar; but where Avar does not transitivise it does not detransitivise either, but rather has verbs categorised as ambitransitive.…”