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Aspectual Constraints on the (Anti)Causative Alternation in Old Italian
Author(s) -
Cennamo Michela
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-968x.2012.01322.x
Subject(s) - alternation (linguistics) , predicate (mathematical logic) , linguistics , morpheme , reflexivity , verb , vernacular , causative , history , allomorph , philosophy , computer science , sociology , social science , programming language
This paper discusses the strategies used for the anticausative alternation and the constraints on their distribution in two early Italian vernaculars, Old Florentine and Old Neapolitan, focusing on the emergence of aspectual notions such as telicity in determining variability in the occurrence of the reflexive morpheme si/se , the main/only strategy for anticausatives with some inherently telic and punctual verbs, depending on the vernacular. It is also shown that in the early varieties the reflexive in the anticausative alternation mainly signals the suppression of the Actor, only gradually coming to mark the presence of a terminal point in the meaning of the verb/predicate.