Els verbs de canvi d'estat i l'alternança causativa en català

Abstract

This thesis intends basically to analyse the syntactic performance of the change of state verbs in Catalan language regarding the involvement in the causative alternation, and moreover to offer a theoretical approach of the syntactic representations of both the causative and the anticausative variation, as well as of their implicated constructions (periphrastic passive, pronominal passive, and middle). The thesis intends, then, to answer different questions such as which verbs take part in the causative alternation in Catalan, and which factors, if any, may determine that a change of state verb may alternate; which structural relation may exist between both alternative constructions, if one derives from the other one; what relation may be with the passive and middle constructions; what role may have the pronominal clitic se, and last but not least which is the syntactic representation related to the analysed constructions and whether these ones maintain a CAUSE component in this representation. The theoretical framework used is that of Distributed Morphology, and we take the neoconstructional proposal as the starting point, not the derivational one, by Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer (2015), in order to slightly revise it and make a proposal which may consider the empirical behaviour of change of state verbs in Catalan in regards of alternation. Therefore, we will firstly analyse the participation in alternation of change of state verbs, from the classifications being proposed for this kind of verbs. In the analysis we propose that the causative constructions with an agent subject do not alternate, and that the corresponding intransitive construction has to be understood as a pronominal passive. Contrarily to what has been traditionally claimed, it is strongly demonstrated that change of state verbs of internal cause also alternate in Catalan, even though with some restrictions when it comes to the subject of the causative variation, a phenomena that we analyse from the Direct Causation Condition by Rappaprot Hovav & Levin (2012) and Rappaport Hovav (2014). Later on, we analyse the kinds of anticausatives in Catalan: those which always take the pronominal clitic in thecausative variant, those which mat take it ornot. The conclusion is that there are very few verbs in Catalan which do not take the clitic or take it optionally, and that the hypothesis according to which it is the degree of spontaneity with which the speaker conceives an event which determines the participation in the alternation and if it takes the clitic or not (Alexiadou, 2014c; Haspelmath, 1993; Haspelmath et al. , 2014; Heidinger, 2015; Schäfer, 2008) can only be adopted as a trend. Next, we analyse the behaviour of the alternanting verbs in relation with the license of adjuncts which show cause; especially the license of the adjunct per si sol, and the anticausative construction with a free dative. Both analyses allow us to conclude that as the anticausative variant as the causative one do not have a CAUSE component in its structures, and that the causative meaning is in fact structural. As regards the theoretical approach, we point out six syntactic structures to account for the constructions of alternation and those related to them, from the combination of the nucleus Voice, Middle, and Passive with a little v and the root. In this sense, we postulate that the roots are freely embedded in these structures, and that that it is postsyntactically the fact that the encyclopaedic component determines if the constructions are accepted or fail. As a result, we show the need of a cognitive principle which accounts for license of the causative constructions with change of state verbs of internal cause.

Date of Award	18 Nov 2016
Original language	Catalan
Supervisor	Jaume Mateu Fontanals (Director)