Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English

What it is about

The question is whether a causative sentence ("John opened the door") entails its anticausative ("The door opened"). Two analyses disagree: the decausativisation view says yes; the reflexive view says the anticausative adds the claim that the theme is an effector, so there is no entailment. Earlier tests used negation and contradiction, which mix logical and metalinguistic negation. The authors instead show short videos of caused events, with the same clips for Norwegian and English speakers, and ask a yes/no question with the anticausative verb ("Did the butter melt?"). Forty-six English and forty-two Norwegian speakers take part, with 14 verbs. English speakers answer "yes" in 92.2% of trials and show almost no effect of whether the theme or the agent is in focus (94.4% theme focus against 90% agent focus). Norwegian speakers answer "yes" in 64.4% of trials, and for unmarked verbs the "yes" rate drops from 90.5% with theme focus to 27.5% with agent focus. The authors conclude that English labile anticausatives are entailed by their causatives, and that Norwegian ones are reflexive.

Ideas

• I1. An entailment rule in world/src/events.rs: when a causative event (agent causes theme to change) is in the world, add the change-of-state event for the theme, if the verb is marked as labile in the lexicon. Mark the added fact as derived, so the answer can say why.
• I2. Lexical flag for labile verbs in en/src/dict.rs (roll, melt, open, break), as an enum value rather than a string. The rule in I1 fires only for flagged verbs; a verb without the flag must not get the entailment.
• I3. Negative control: the entailment must not be applied across the board. Non-alternating transitive verbs with no intransitive change-of-state use (hit, kick, carry) must get no derived change-of-state fact. Build a set of such verbs and check that the rule abstains on all of them.
• I4. A yes/no evaluation set in English built from the 14 verb pairs (causative sentence, then anticausative question) with the paper's ceiling (96% for the causative) as a check on the world's input; target the paper's 92% yes rate for English, and check the rule against the agent-focus items.

For Mova

The chapters are 13. Verbs (labile verbs and the causative alternation), 28. Voice and the passive (no by-phrase with anticausatives, the passive contrast) and 30. Pragmatics and discourse: overview (entailment against metalinguistic negation). The code is world/src/events.rs (event facts), world/src/qa.rs (yes/no answers) and en/src/dict.rs (the lexical flag). Measures: the rule's yes-rate on English items against the paper's 92.2%, a run-twice determinism check, and the abstention count on agent-focus items as the negative control. The Norwegian data are for contrast only and are not a Mova target.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.158

@article{lundquist2016anticausatives,
  title = {{Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English}},
  author = {Lundquist, Björn and Corley, Martin and Tungseth, Mai and Sorace, Antonella and Ramchand, Gillian},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.158},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.158}
}

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28. How to cite this article: Lundquist, Björn, Martin Corley, Mai Tungseth, Antonella Sorace and Gillian Ramchand. 2016. Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1(1): 47. 1–30, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.158 ↗ our card
29. Published: 29 November 2016 find
30. Copyright: © 2016 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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