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On the licensing of causatives of directed motion: Waltzing Matilda all over *
Author(s) -
Folli Raffaella,
Harley Heidi
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.2006.00135.x
Subject(s) - alternation (linguistics) , causative , linguistics , verb , property (philosophy) , motion (physics) , psychology , communication , philosophy , computer science , artificial intelligence , epistemology
. This paper focuses on one famous example of an alternation that has been supposed to depend on telicity, the causative manner‐of‐motion alternation in English John ran the dog *(to the park) . One standard approach has taken telicity to be central to the possibility of causative formation. We argue here that although telicity can be a property of these constructions, it is not necessary for the formation of a motion causative in English. Rather, what licenses the alternation is the availability of a specific syntactic structure, containing a small clause, interacting with non‐telicity‐related semantic restrictions imposed by verb meanings.