Yet Another Piece of Evidence for the Common Base Approach to Japanese Causative/Inchoative Alternations

Yet Another Piece of Evidence for the Common Base Approach to Japanese Causative/Inchoative Alternations Tomokazu Takehisa Niigata University of Pharmacy and Applied Life Sciences 265-1 Higashijima, Akiha-ku, Niigata 956-8603, Japan takehisa@nupals.ac.jp Abstract This paper presents yet another argument for the view that both the causative and in- choative verbs in the Japanese causative al- ternation are syntactically equally complex, derived independently from common bases. While morphological considerations alone suggest that such an approach must be taken to account for cases involving equipollent alternations, which have overt morphemes for both the causative and inchoative affixes, the question remains unsettled as to whether there are cases where such processes as causativization of inchoative verbs or anti- causativization of causative verbs are in- volved. In an attempt to answer this question, this paper examines the three ap- proaches to the causative alternation by uti- lizing the possibility of having idiomatic interpretations as a probe into the syntactic structure. Evidence from idioms reveals that the common base approach still fares better. As a further consequence, postulation of a phonologically null morpheme is forced for some causative and inchoative affixes. 1 Introduction It has been standard since the early days of gen- erative grammar that causative verbs are as- sumed to be syntactically more complex than their inchoative counterparts, reflecting their se- mantic complexity. While specific analyses like Dowty (1979) are long gone, their spirit remains alive and well and has been instantiated in later theoretical constructs such as Lexical Conceptual Structure (e.g., Rappaport and Levin, 1988) and double VP structure (e.g., Hale and Keyser, 1993). Moreover, while structural complexity per se is independent of the issue of the derivational relationship between the causative and inchoative alternants, it has been also standard to assume that causatives are virtually derived from their inchoative counterparts via operations like Predi- cate Raising in Generative Semantics or Head Movement in the GB/MP framework. Thus, the causativization approach, which views causatives as based on inchoatives, has been influential across a variety of theoretical perspectives. Two more approaches can be discerned as al- ternatives to handle the derivational relationship between the two alternants. One involves the process of anticausativization of causative verbs (e.g., Levin and Rappaport Hovav, 1995), and the other approach, proposed by researchers like Piñón (2001) and Alexiadou et al. (2006), is the common base approach, where both the causative and inchoative alternants are derived inde- pendently from an identical root. The three pos- sible approaches to the causative/inchoative alternation are given in (1).1 (1) a. The Causativization Approach Causatives are derived from inchoatives. b. The Anticausativization Approach Inchoatives are derived from causatives. c. The Common Base Approach Causatives and inchoatives are derived from their common bases. Japanese sheds light on this issue of deriva- tion from a different angle: the language is very well known for having rich derivational and in- 1 See Haspelmath (1993) for a classification of the alterna- tion in terms of markedness relations. In this paper, I focus on ways to relate the two …

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